Chapter 4
Zoya~
I walked into the kitchen to see my mother making herself a late breakfast, and she looked unfairly happy, which was an uncharitable thought.
Still, I couldn’t help how I felt, though I did my best to try.
No matter what could be said of this past year, my mother had been a good mother to me all these years, and I’d be a shitty daughter to jump ship without her now.
“Hey,” I said, greeting her as I made my way towards the refrigerator.
“I thought you said that we were good on the bills,” she said, her greeting a lot different from mine. “I saw a couple of late notices when I grabbed the mail yesterday and...well, it just isn’t the thing, Zoya. When your uncle was alive, we never had late bills.”
Forgetting about the orange juice in the refrigerator, I turned to look at my mother. “Well, that’s the difference between a bratva salary and waitressing wages,” I replied, trying to keep the anger from my tone. “Plus, Uncle Armen was only paying your bills, not mine.”
After my uncle had been killed, my mother had been left completely bereft, and I’d been scared to leave her alone.
Not only had she lost the only family that she could count on, but the Korolevs had shown up on her doorstep twice, which had been enough to worry anyone with a brain.
However, it hadn’t been until she hadn’t gotten out of bed for three days that my concern had really grown.
So, after having lost my job, it’d made sense to move in with her, not only for the emotional support that’d been needed, but also to give us both time to figure out what to do financially.
Between my savings and Uncle Armen’s estate, I’d been under the impression that we’d be okay for a while.
Yeah, no.
Doing my best to navigate the unknown, I had taken my entire savings, had made a significant payment towards my mother’s house, then had refinanced to lower the payments, thinking that a minimum-wage job would get us by if we couldn’t find something that paid more.
However, I hadn’t planned on my mother feeling like she didn’t need to work.
For whatever reason, she kept convincing herself that my uncle’s money would never run out, and nothing that I said would snap her out of her grief-stricken denial.
So, now I was broke, my uncle’s money was running out, and my mother still refused to work.
Plus, if that wasn’t enough, not only did she refuse to get a job, but every word out of her mouth sounded unreal and ungrateful as hell.
Having been taken care of her entire life, she really believed that the responsibility now fell on my shoulders, and she felt absolutely no embarrassment over it.
“Well, have you considered getting a second job since waitressing obviously isn’t paying you enough?” she asked, and it was a miracle that I didn’t bite clean through my tongue.
“Well, have you considered getting a job?” I shot back. “Whether you want to accept it or not, Uncle Armen isn’t here to support you anymore, Mom.”
She gasped, and I wasn’t surprised at what came next. “I know that he’s no longer here, Zoya,” she cried out dramatically. “It’s all that I think about, but you act like I should be over it already.”
“That’s not what I’m saying,” I argued. “I’m just saying that the world doesn’t stop for our personal tragedies, Mom. The mortgage company...the utility companies, they don’t care that we’ve suffered a loss in our family. All they care about is getting paid.”
“Armen was murdered, Zoya,” she hissed tearfully. “His death wasn’t an accident or due to some unfortunate illness. He was killed.”
“The world doesn’t care,” I repeated. “The only people that care are us and my babushka i dedushka.” Now, while I didn’t know a lot of Russian, I knew the word for grandparents.
Ignoring that, she said, “I can’t believe that you expect me to work when I’m still mourning my brother after such a heinous situation.”
“Mom, Uncle Armen conspired to kill Aurora Korolev,” I said pointedly, though it killed me that it sounded as if I was excusing what the Korolevs had done. “He wasn’t exactly an innocent bystander.”
She gasped again. “How can you say such a thing?’
“Because it’s true,” I argued. “It’s true, and it’s time that you stop...stop self-medicating and face the truth of what happened. I need you to help me here.”
She started shaking her head at me, and I knew that this conversation was over. Her breakfast forgotten, she said, “I am going to go lay down and rest. I’m also not going to stand here and let you sully your uncle’s good name.”
What in the actual fuck?
“Mom, you can’t avoid reality forever,” I said, speaking softer, trying to reach her. “You need to get a job, and then we both need to figure out how to get our lives back.”
“How do you expect me to get my life back without your uncle’s help?” she bit out, quite seriously.
“Then you carve out a new life, Mom,” I replied. “I’ve suggested it before, but why can’t we just take whatever money is left and move-”
“And run away like cowards?” she gasped again. “What would everyone think?”
“Who cares what they’ll think?” I countered for the millionth time. “We’ll be long gone.”
“I have friends here, Zoya-”
“What friends?” I asked, finally snapping back. “Where are these friends of yours? No one has been to the house since the Korolevs branded us traitors. Our last name is tainted in this city, so what are we still doing here? Why can’t we go somewhere else to start over?”
Ignoring the remark about her non-existent friends, she asked, “Start over with what, Zoya? If we don’t have money to pay the bills, what makes you think that we have money to move?”
“We can sell the house and then-”
“I’m not listening to this,” she huffed. “I am not going to listen to you talk about selling our home.”
“Mom, I love you,” I told her. “I love you, but I am not going to spend the rest of my life doing this.”
“Doing what?”
“Supporting you financially,” I finally said. “I moved in with you as a temporary solution to help get us through this rough time, but I am not going to...to throw away my life by working two jobs because you can’t get it together.”
“You know, all this time, I’d been under the impression that I’d been a good mother to you,” she said, angering me even more.
“Don’t do that,” I said. “Do not try to emotionally manipulate me.”
“It’s not manipulation if it’s the truth, Zoya,” she fired back. “I wouldn’t think that it’d be such a big deal to pay me back during my time of need.”
“Pay you back?” I echoed. “You want me to pay you back for being my mother? Are you serious?”
“I’m not listening to this,” she repeated, but before I could say anything more, she stormed out of the kitchen, and all I could do was drop on one of the kitchen table chairs as the slamming of her bedroom door could be heard all throughout the house.
She made it sound as if I was the ungrateful one, but that wasn’t the case at all. I just wanted my life back, and she was a grown ass adult. She needed to finally take responsibility for her life, and her growth and happiness shouldn’t depend on whether I could pay her bills on time or not.
So, why did I feel guilty?
I was also self-aware enough to recognize that I wasn’t even sure that I could leave my mother, even if I had the means to.
Before Uncle Armen had gotten himself killed, my mother had been a good person.
She’d been funny, lively, charismatic, and I’d lost count of how many times we’d gone to dinner together to catch up like best friends.
Our relationship had been solid and strong, but now I couldn’t even recognize what we’d become.
I could also do math, so even with the sale of the house, it’d be hard to start over if my mother refused to work.
Even if we’d opted for a smaller home or condo, the leftover money would barely be enough to see us through any emergencies.
As it was, the health insurance that I got from the diner didn’t allow me to add my mother since she wasn’t a minor or an incapacitated dependent, which meant that we couldn’t afford for her to even catch a cold at this point.
While I’d been joking with Marcelle about winning the lottery, that seemed like the only viable solution to this mess, but I also knew that winning the damn lottery was never going to happen. Not only was it a horrible plan-A, but I hadn’t been joking about not being able to afford a ticket.
As I sat and considered getting a second job, tears began to threaten behind my eyes, and despair was quickly bubbling to the surface.
I felt alone and inept, and even though my brain knew better, my feelings were too jumbled to process that none of this was my fault nor was the aftermath any of my responsibility.
I felt trapped.
I felt trapped, and I didn’t know how to make the feeling go away. Sure, I could leave my mother to her own devices, but would I still be able to live with myself afterwards? Would I still be able to start fresh like I wanted to if I knew that my mother had been left behind to suffer on her own?
Probably not.