My husband was sure he had decided everything for me long ago. But with that decision, he only made things worse for himself.
My name is Dasha. I work as a financial auditor, so I’m used to seeing through not only tangled accounting statements, but people as well.
My husband Igor, on the other hand, firmly believed he possessed the cunning of Professor Moriarty and the grace of James Bond. In reality, his spying skills ended exactly where my ability to put two and two together began.
About three years ago, a Great Economic Crisis of local family scale suddenly struck our household. Igor began coming home with a face as if he personally, with his bare hands, was holding up the collapsing national currency.
“Dashunya, times are hard,” he would sigh heavily, generously spreading a thick layer of farm butter on his sandwich — butter bought, by the way, with my money.
“At work, they’ve brutally cut bonuses, canceled incentives. My salary has shrunk. We’ll have to tighten our belts somehow.”
Igor’s version of tightening our belts looked very peculiar — and very comfortable for him. He gracefully stopped contributing to the utilities.
“Well, you pay it automatically from your card anyway, what difference does it make? Let it stay that way.”
Then he forgot the way to the supermarket.
“I get lost in all those discounts. You’d better do it yourself, you have a good eye for that.”
And soon, he completely delegated to me the honorable right to pay for our vacation.
His own salary disappeared into thin air with the agility of David Copperfield. In other words, my husband had simply started stashing money away.
The situation was made worse by my dear mother-in-law, Zinaida Pavlovna. That woman was made of reinforced-concrete principles, a persistent smell of Corvalol, and a deep, almost religious conviction that I was robbing her boy.
Her visits resembled the Tatar-Mongol yoke: she arrived without warning, conducted a severe inspection of the refrigerator, and collected tribute in the form of my nerve cells.
“Darya,” Zinaida Pavlovna would proclaim tragically, holding a piece of parmesan between two fingers with disgust, as if it were radioactive ore.
“What is all this extravagance for? Igorek is working himself to exhaustion, he’s pale as a moth! And you buy cheese at the price of a gold bar. In our day, a good wife protected her husband’s every kopeck!”
I would only smile sweetly, without looking up from my laptop.
“Zinaida Pavlovna, I would gladly feed Igor exclusively pearl barley and holy spirit, but his delicate emotional constitution requires parmesan. Besides, this cheese was paid for with my card. So your son’s kopeck is completely safe, wherever it may be hiding.”
Then my mother-in-law would turn to her son and move on to the main purpose of her visit.
“Igorek, my son… The slate roof at my dacha is completely falling apart. Any day now the rains will flood everything, and the whole harvest will rot. Couldn’t you help your mother with some money for repairs?”
Igor’s face would immediately change, taking on the appearance of an orphan from a Charles Dickens novel.
“Mama, I’d be glad to with all my heart,” my husband would whisper tragically, hiding his shifting eyes.
“But we’re in a black streak ourselves right now. A crisis! We’re barely scraping together enough for food. What roof are you talking about? We’re trying not to starve ourselves! There’s absolutely no money. None at all. I haven’t even saved up for new winter tires.”
My mother-in-law would press her lips together so tightly they turned into a barcode and cast a scorching look at me.
“Husband and wife are one wallet! You could help your mother, egoist!”
I would only nod, mentally placing a big check mark. So, Igorek complains to his mother about poverty, refuses her by saying I eat everything up. Very interesting.
The truth came out almost laughably easily. One fine Saturday, Igor went off fishing, and I decided to hang a new painting in the hallway. I climbed up to the mezzanine for my husband’s precious little toolbox.
I pulled out a dusty box from a rotary hammer drill — the one Igor had used exactly once in his life, to drill a hole in my patience.
There was no drill inside. Instead, there was a heavy, tightly packed postal envelope.
I sat down on the stepladder. Opened the flap. Thick bundles of cash looked cheerfully back at me. Rubles, dollars, a little bit of euros.
As a true auditor, I quickly counted the capital. The sum was enough not only to replace the roof at Zinaida Pavlovna’s dacha, but to buy the dacha itself — together with Zinaida Pavlovna, the chairman, and the surrounding garden association.
My beloved trickster had been hiding money on the scale of a Hollywood con artist. While I paid the utilities, groceries, his dentist, and the cat food, Igor carefully stored his salary in a plastic case.
Throw a tantrum? Smash dishes? Throw that very envelope at him when he returned?
Absolutely not. I know that revenge is a dish served not merely cold, but frozen in liquid nitrogen.
I carefully put the envelope back, closed the box, and began developing a plan. If my husband wanted to play poverty, we would play it so convincingly that Stanislavsky himself would stand and applaud, shouting, “I believe it!”
On Monday, Igor came home from work and headed to the fridge as usual. He opened the door and froze. Inside, it was as empty as the head of a reality-show contestant. On the middle shelf stood one single lonely aluminum pot.
“Dasha? Where’s the meat? Where’s the sausage?” my husband’s voice treacherously trembled.
“Igoresha,” I came out of the room, wrapped in an old down shawl — purely for dramatic effect.
“You were right. The crisis has hit us with full force. My clients’ payments are delayed. I reviewed our budget.
“We have to survive. In the pot, there are plain macaroni. No butter. Butter is an unaffordable luxury these days.”
Igor ate the plain pasta with a face as if he were chewing his own tongue.
The next day, I disconnected cable television and home internet.
“We’re saving electricity, darling,” I reported cheerfully by the light of one dim bulb in the hallway.
“I didn’t even turn on the washing machine today. I washed your work shirts with laundry soap right in the sink. The smell is specific, of course, but what savings for the family budget!”
By the end of the week, Igor had genuinely grown gaunt. He couldn’t go to cafés with his colleagues because “there was no money,” and asking me for cash for lunches was impossible because of his own legend.
He also couldn’t open his secret stash — because then he would have to explain to me where it had suddenly come from. He had fallen into his own carefully laid trap.
On Sunday, Zinaida Pavlovna arrived without a declaration of war. Seeing her son sadly chewing plain buckwheat, washing it down with tea from a teabag — brewed personally by me for the third time, just for color — my mother-in-law clutched her heart.
“What are you doing to my son, you monster?!” she howled across the whole kitchen. “He’s become transparent! Nothing but cheekbones sticking out!”
“Zinaida Pavlovna!” I tragically threw up my hands and squeezed out an incredibly sincere tear.
“We’re in trouble! Igor told you himself — there’s no money at all! His salary has been cut to pennies. I’m carrying us as best I can, working two jobs. Yesterday I even wanted to take my winter coat to a pawnshop so I could buy him at least some vitamins…”
Zinaida Pavlovna shifted her stunned gaze to Igor.
“My son… is that true? Have you become so poor that your wife is pawning her coats? And you told me you were just having temporary difficulties? How could you bring the family to such disgrace?”
Igor was silent, red as a crayfish boiled in water. He physically couldn’t say to his mother, “Mom, calm down, I’ve got millions lying in the drill box.”
“But do you know what’s most terrible?” I lowered my voice to a tragic whisper, forcing my mother-in-law to lean closer, almost touching the empty sugar bowl with her nose.
“Zinaida Pavlovna… You called him selfish. You scolded him for not wanting to help you with the roof, for lying about having no money. But I accidentally learned the truth.”
I darted into the hallway, took that very thick, plump envelope from the mezzanine, and returned to the kitchen. Carefully, but heavily, I placed it on the table in front of my speechless mother-in-law.
“Igor is a saint,” I declared with anguish worthy of a theater stage.
“He is not poor. He is simply a great martyr! All these years he has been underfed. He has walked around in old shoes. He allowed me to pay all the bills, lived half-starved… And all for what? For YOU!”
Igor’s eyes nearly popped out of his head. He jerked toward the table, reaching for the envelope, but my icy warning look nailed him firmly to his chair.
“Here,” I slapped my palm loudly against the stacks of bills, “is money. His secret stash. He saved it for almost three years! He put it aside kopeck by kopeck, depriving himself of everything.
“So he could surprise you! So he could replace that long-suffering roof at your dacha, send you to the best sanatorium in Karlovy Vary, and get you those Swiss implants you’ve always dreamed of!”
Zinaida Pavlovna trembled all over. Her hands, guided by some ancient centuries-old instinct of hoarding, clutched the envelope in a death grip. She looked at her son with eyes full of tears of repentance and burning maternal shame.
“Igoresha…” she sobbed, convulsively pressing the plump envelope to her chest.
“My golden boy! And I, old fool that I am, reproached you! I thought you were greedy, that you didn’t want to help your own mother. But you… you laid your youth on the altar! Forgive me, my son!”
Igor’s face resembled a plaster mask of ancient suffering. If he opened his mouth now and said, “Mom, give it back right now, I was secretly saving it from my wife for a new SUV,” he would forever destroy the image of the perfect son and appear before her as an absolute monster. He had been driven into a dead end by his own lies and greed.
“Well then,” I smiled radiantly, elegantly brushing an invisible speck of dust from my blouse.
“Peace and family harmony have been restored. Zinaida Pavlovna, start fixing the roof first thing tomorrow, so Igor can enjoy seeing the fruits of his long suffering.”
I walked over to the wardrobe in the hallway, rolled out the suitcase I had packed in advance, and gently patted its plastic handle.
“And what… what is that?” the suddenly impoverished and morally destroyed husband croaked, staring at the suitcase in horror.
“That, darling, is your luggage for a light start into a bright future,” I answered casually.
“My mission in this marriage is complete: I helped you become the perfect son. I’ll file for divorce tomorrow. The apartment, as you remember, is premarital property and mine. So leave the keys over there on the little table.”
I opened the front door wide in front of him.
“And yes, Igoresha… take the empty rotary-hammer box with you. You never know, you might start saving up for something else.”
I closed the door behind him, leaving Igor on the other side of the stairwell — finally alone with his happy mother, her new roof, and his collapsed Machiavellian plans.