She took up her fork again and, with deliberately cheerful appetite, speared a slice of cucumber.
“Should we invite both of them, then? The third room is sitting empty anyway. We’ll put in two beds, one on each side. It’ll be fun. A real Italian household. So, is it settled?”
Kyle silently pushed away the plate with his half-eaten chicken. Whatever hunger he had left vanished on the spot. He stared at his wife and realized she was not joking. She was not bluffing either. In her eyes burned the merciless excitement of a strategist who had just found a game worth playing. He still wanted to believe this was some ridiculous impulse and that she would come to her senses. What he did not know was that the wicked little plan had not been born in Erin’s head at all, but in her brilliant mother’s during a phone call an hour earlier—and the mechanism was already in motion.
Two days later, their three-bedroom apartment no longer felt like their home. It had become a firing range, a strip of disputed land where two hostile powers had come face-to-face.
Rita arrived first. She did not so much enter as roll into the hallway like a bowling ball, with Kyle staggering in behind her under the weight of two enormous plaid bags and an old but carefully maintained wheeled suitcase.
“Well, here I am—welcome your tenant!” she announced from the threshold, looking around with the proprietary gaze of someone conducting an inspection. “Kyle, take the suitcase straight to the room, and the bags go to the kitchen. There’s food in there; we can’t have it spoiling. Erin, sweetheart, what is that dust doing in the corner? Someone ought to wipe it.”
She moved with decisive force, without pauses, filling the apartment as if she had expanded to match its walls. Her energy was less like a personality trait and more like a natural disaster—loud, sweeping, and impossible to argue with. She went directly into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, shook her head at the half-empty shelves, and began unloading her homemade provisions from the bags. Erin’s elegant jar of olives was pushed firmly into the farthest corner. Rita did not ask permission. She established order—her order—which was, by definition, the only correct one and therefore not up for discussion.
An hour later, the doorbell rang for the second time. Nina appeared on the doorstep quietly, almost without a sound. She wore a graceful coat and carried a small, refined handbag. She was Rita’s complete opposite: not a tsunami, but a slow rise of water that you only notice once it is already at your knees.
“Good evening,” she said softly, offering Erin her powdered cheek for a kiss. “Hello, Kyle. I see you already have company.”
Her gaze drifted through the hallway and came to rest on Rita, who at that very moment emerged from the kitchen with a damp cloth in her hand.
“Rita,” Kyle said, introducing the mothers while feeling a cold trickle of sweat run down his back.
“Nina,” Erin’s mother replied with a polite smile that contained not a single degree of warmth.
The first blood was drawn that same evening. After dinner, which consisted of the meat patties Rita had brought with her, everyone moved into the living room.
Rita, behaving like the rightful mistress of the house, settled into Kyle’s favorite armchair and took firm possession of the television remote. At exactly nine, her beloved show was about to begin—a tear-soaked saga about the heavy burdens of a woman’s destiny.
“There we go, Ruins of Happiness is starting,” she declared, pressing a button.
“Could we perhaps switch to the arts channel?” Nina asked. “They’re broadcasting from the Vienna Opera House tonight. One does occasionally long for something that nourishes the soul, rather than all this…”
The way she said “all this” sounded like a verdict handed down against cheap mass-produced goods. Rita slowly turned her head. Her face, flushed from dinner, darkened like a storm cloud.
“I’ve been on my feet all day. Packing, hauling things, settling in. I am tired. I want to watch my show and rest.”
“One can rest perfectly well with one’s eyes closed,” Nina replied, without allowing her courteous tone to change. “Good music, on the other hand, calms the nervous system. Kyle, you don’t object to listening to Mozart, do you?”
Kyle felt like a target standing between two rifles in the hands of expert marksmen.
“Moms, why are you acting like children?” he said, trying to sound reasonable. “Let’s watch the news instead. That’s a compromise.”
But compromise had already left the building. This was no longer about a television channel. It was a contest for authority. Erin, tucked into the far corner of the couch, watched the scene in silence, a faint, nearly invisible smile resting at the edge of her lips.
By morning, the war had escalated to a new front. The battle for the bathroom began at seven sharp. Rita captured it first and remained inside for an impressive length of time, running the water loudly and singing folk songs at full volume. Nina waited for her turn with a face carved from stone, then locked herself in for just as long, though in absolute, sepulchral silence—which somehow proved even more maddening. Kyle, already late for work, was left stranded in the hallway with his toothbrush in his hand and no options.