I am 50 years old, married for 28 years, my husband and I have two adult children. The oldest daughter is already a mom herself twice, the youngest son also lives separately from us.
My spouse and I live in an apartment, but as we have a wooden house outside the city, from spring to late fall we live there. After all, there is fresh air, a vegetable garden and it is convenient to get to work, although we have to get up earlier than in the city, but it is not difficult for us.
That is, all the time our apartment is empty. This is what attracted my childhood friend Monica, who divorced her spouse not too long ago and she just had nowhere to go. I decided to help, but what happened next was the real chutzpah.
I gave her the keys in early May, and my spouse and I moved into our house. A couple of times a month I stopped by to pick up some things, then on other occasions. And a little later I stopped coming, and she takes care of a lot of things on her own and doesn’t touch me. I might never have even known that someone besides Monica lived in our apartment, if at the end of July a neighbor called me and asked:
“Did you sell the apartment?”
I replied that no – the apartment still belongs to us, just a close friend of mine lives there temporarily. To this, the neighbor said:
“So you have not just one friend living here, but several at once, and they also have five or six friends coming over every day!”
Of course, what I heard made me very nervous. It’s one thing to have someone you know living in your house, but it’s quite another thing to have an apartment turned into a courtyard of passageways. I decided not to call my friend, and went straight away to find out what was going on. In the end I arrived on time:
Some middle-aged man was just coming out of my apartment, and a girl was standing next to him in the hallway. When I saw this picture, I asked if the landlady was home. The answer was yes, and I asked if she could come out. My friend came out.
I asked her:
“How long have you been a hostess here?”
She tried to justify herself, but it didn’t work out. In the end, I found out that she rented two spare rooms to two different people, and she herself lived in the third. It wasn’t a bad part-time job, at the cost of my repairs and my investment in the apartment. After an hour there was no one in the apartment, and my friend and I still do not communicate.
I thought that at 50 years old, I could not be surprised, but I was wrong.
