“We’ll each pay for ourselves,” Vera said. Her husband agreed happily, without thinking it through.
Vera was tired of the Friday inspections of every receipt. So she suggested to her husband that they switch to separate budgets. Oleg agreed happily, not suspecting how much all the things he considered “free” actually cost.
Vera placed the plate on the table. The borscht was still steaming, the thick smell of beetroot and bay leaf drifting through the kitchen, with slices of bread and a small bowl of sour cream lying nearby.
Oleg came home from work exactly at seven. He kicked off his shoes by the door, walked into the kitchen without even changing clothes, sat down, picked up a spoon, buried himself in his phone, and started eating.
Their eight-year-old son Lyosha had already eaten dinner and was putting together a construction set in his room. Vera stood by the sink, washing the pot. Warm water ran over her hands, and outside the window, evening was falling.
Then Oleg pushed his plate away. He opened his banking app. And began what Vera had long ago privately named “the Friday audit.”
“Twelve thousand in one week on groceries. Do you even look at what you’re buying?”
She did not turn around. She knew that tone by heart, heard it every Friday like clockwork. How much for meat. Why the expensive butter. Why the chicken wasn’t on sale.
Oleg worked as a manager at a construction company and earned one hundred and twenty thousand. Vera did the bookkeeping for a small firm for seventy thousand. The difference in their salaries gave her husband, in his firm belief, the right to inspect every receipt. And every Friday he exercised that right with visible pleasure.
But Oleg did not subject his own expenses to any audit. Subscriptions to three streaming services. A barbershop twice a month. Beer with Dima and Sasha on Thursdays. A fishing rod for eight thousand, bought in March, even though he went fishing maybe twice a year. All of that fell under the unspoken category of “I earned it.”
Sound familiar?
That evening, Vera finished washing the dishes, dried her hands on the kitchen towel, and sat down across from her husband. Lyosha was already falling asleep. The apartment was quiet; only the refrigerator hummed in a steady, low voice.
“You know what, Oleg? Let’s try it. You want us each to pay for ourselves?”
He looked up from his phone.
“What do you mean?”
“Exactly that. Separate budgets. Each of us pays half the utilities, buys our own food, and decides how to spend our own money. We split Lyosha’s expenses in half.”
She said it completely evenly. No hurt in her voice, no challenge, no pressure. As if she were reading out the clauses of a standard contract. She was an accountant, after all.
A calculator immediately started clicking in Oleg’s head. One hundred and twenty minus half the utilities, minus half of Lyosha’s expenses. That still left a pile of free money. No Friday interrogations or reports for every receipt.
Freedom.
“Deal,” Oleg said, smiling as he leaned back in his chair.
Vera nodded, stood up, and went to the bedroom. Oleg remained in the kitchen with the feeling of a man who had won an argument that had never happened. For some reason, he did not notice that Vera smiled too as she walked down the hallway. Barely noticeably, only with the corners of her lips.
The first week, Oleg enjoyed himself.
He bought himself a ribeye steak, craft beer, ate in front of the television, and watched football without a single comment about money. Silence and peace.
Vera cooked dinner for herself and Lyosha. She did not cook for Oleg. Not out of spite, no. They had agreed, after all: each person for themselves.
For the first three days, he ordered delivery. Sushi on Monday, pizza on Tuesday, shawarma on Wednesday. By Thursday, he opened his banking app and whistled. Four and a half thousand in three days on food. Just for himself alone.
“All right,” he decided. “I’ll cook for myself.”
Have you ever met a person who is convinced that cooking takes ten minutes? Oleg was exactly that kind of person. He went to the store and grabbed the simplest set: pasta, chicken fillet, sauce in a jar.
The pasta turned into a sticky mess because he forgot to set a timer. The chicken came out dry on the outside and suspiciously pink on the inside. And the jarred sauce turned out to be sickeningly sweet.
Oleg ate it in silence. It was a shame to throw it away.
The next day, he repeated the same thing with the same result, because there was nothing else in his culinary repertoire. And the day after that too.
Meanwhile, Vera was eating dinner beside him. On her plate lay baked trout with lemon, a fresh vegetable salad, and warm bread from the bakery around the corner. Lyosha was eating the same thing, swinging his legs under the table and telling her how Vitka from the parallel class had brought a grass snake to school.
Oleg chewed his clumped pasta and tried not to look at other people’s plates.
By the end of the week, he had spent eleven thousand on food. Before, Vera had fed the whole family for thirty-five. Three people. Varied and delicious meals.
The second week began with karate.
Lyosha attended the section three times a week: Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. Before, Vera had driven him herself because the gym was ten minutes from her office. She picked her son up from school on the way, waited an hour, then drove home. All of this happened so invisibly that Oleg never even thought about the logistics.
Now they took turns. Tuesday was Oleg’s day, Thursday was Vera’s, and Saturday alternated.
But Oleg’s office was on the other side of the city. On his first Tuesday, he left work an hour early, spent forty minutes in traffic getting to the school, and another twenty getting to the section. He waited for Lyosha in the car, scrolling through the news and getting angry at traffic lights. Then came the road back. The evening vanished as if someone had pulled it out of the day.
“Is it like this every Tuesday?” he asked Vera.
She shrugged.
“I did this three times a week. For two years straight.”
Then came the laundry. Oleg had spent his whole life thinking that the washing machine did the laundry. You threw things in, pressed a button, and took them out. One minute of personal involvement, no more.
How wrong he was.
Before washing, things had to be sorted. Colors from whites, wool separately, synthetics at a different temperature. And there were different kinds of detergent. Oleg knew nothing about any of this.
He swept everything into the drum, poured in extra detergent, and started a sixty-degree cycle. His light blue shirt, his favorite one, the very same shirt for important meetings, came out of the machine grayish pink.
Vera saw it on the balcony. Her gaze lingered on it for a second. She said nothing.
Oleg crumpled the shirt and threw it into the corner of the balcony. He was not angry at Vera. He was angry at himself. At this whole world where laundry turned out to be more complicated than management reports. And yet his wife had warned him every time he threw socks on top of the washing machine instead of into the basket. He had simply not listened.
Then there was ironing. His first time ever. A scorch mark on the sleeve of a white shirt became the answer to the question of why Oleg should not have taken up an iron without instructions.
Another shirt ruined.
By the middle of the month, things appeared that Oleg had simply never noticed before.
Toilet paper, for example. It had always been in the holder. Like electricity in an outlet. And also soap, dish sponges, garbage bags, glass cleaner, toothpaste, cotton pads, paper napkins, fabric softener.
In ten years of marriage, Oleg had not bought a single roll of toilet paper. Not once. He had simply never thought about where it came from.
He went to the store with a list of five items: toilet paper, soap, detergent, sponges, garbage bags. He came out with a receipt for one thousand eight hundred. For household little things? Seriously?
And Vera had bought all of this for years. Every week, without a single word and without a report. The expenses simply did not exist in Oleg’s picture of the world because he had never gone into that aisle of the store.
Then the bills piled up. Utilities, internet, mobile service, school fees, after-school care. Before, Vera had paid everything herself, while Oleg simply transferred money to the shared card and considered the matter closed.
Now he had to figure it all out himself. The housing services account, meter readings, tariffs, payment details. He spent an hour and a half just submitting the water readings. The website froze and erased the data.
He called the hotline. Twenty-two minutes of waiting to a tune that seemed stuck somewhere in the nineties. He hung up.
In the next room, Vera was quietly working on her laptop. Her half of all the bills had been paid on the second of the month, in fifteen minutes.
And then came the school meeting.
Lyosha brought home a note: Saturday, discussion of the class trip to Suzdal. Money, signatures, organizational issues.
Vera had always gone to the meetings. Oleg did not know his son’s classroom number and did not remember the class teacher’s surname. But if expenses for the child were split in half, then participation was too. Fair, right?
He came and sat in the back row. Around him were mothers who knew one another by name. They discussed children’s allergies, the bus schedule, who would bring the first-aid kit, who would be responsible for packed lunches. Oleg stayed silent. He had nothing to say because he did not know a single answer about his own son.
“Can Lyosha eat nuts?” asked the woman sitting on his right.
Could he? Couldn’t he? Oleg froze for half a second and blurted out at random:
“He can.”
That evening, he checked with Vera. It turned out that he really could. Lucky.
On Monday, the teacher called. Lyosha had an exemption from physical education, and they needed a note from the pediatrician. Oleg did not know where the medical card was. Which clinic his son was registered with. What the district doctor’s name was.
He called Vera. She dictated the address, the office number, the doctor’s hours, and where the insurance policy was kept. Her voice was even, calm, without a trace of reproach. The voice of a person who had done this hundreds of times.
She hung up.
Oleg stood in the hallway with the phone in his hand and felt as if he had looked backstage at his own life for the first time. There, behind the scenes, Vera had been working for years. Without days off. Without applause.
In the third week, Oleg decided the problem could be solved with money. He was a manager, after all. He knew how to optimize processes.
He ordered a cleaning service. A woman named Natalia cleaned the apartment in two hours for four thousand. Oleg looked at the sparkling bathroom and thought: there, see? Solvable.
But cleaning was needed at least once a week. Four times four. Sixteen thousand a month just for cleanliness.
And food? He could subscribe to a ready-made meal service. Oleg found a suitable one, looked at the price, and closed the tab. Thirty thousand a month for one person. For food that Vera prepared from thirty-five thousand worth of groceries. For three people.
Oleg sat with a calculator and began to understand something simple. Even if he tried to replace Vera’s contribution with money, it would cost more than his salary. And that was without school meetings, clinics, meter readings, and all the things that could not be handed over to a courier.
Who had ever decided that domestic labor was worth nothing?
At the end of the month, Oleg opened a blank spreadsheet and began entering numbers. He was a manager, after all; he knew how to work with data.
Food for the month: twenty-three thousand. For one person. Even though half his dinners consisted of sticky pasta with overcooked chicken.
Household chemicals and small supplies: three and a half thousand.
One-time cleaning: four thousand.
Deliveries during the first week: four and a half thousand.
Gas for trips to the section: two thousand eight hundred.
Two ruined shirts: five and a half thousand.
Altogether, the additional expenses came to more than forty thousand. Plus half the utilities, plus Lyosha’s expenses.
But money turned out not to be the main thing. Oleg estimated the time. Cooking, laundry, ironing, cleaning, driving, bills, phone calls, lines, school matters. More than sixty hours in a month. Two hours from every day, taken from evenings, weekends, and sleep.
Everything that had once seemed to happen by itself.
No. Not “by itself.” Vera did it. Every day, after her own eight-hour job for seventy thousand a month. And he had still interrogated her about chicken that had not been bought on sale.
That evening, Oleg called his mother. Not for advice. More to let it out.
“Mom, she set this whole thing up. On purpose.”
Tamara Pavlovna was silent for a moment. Then she asked:
“Do you know how much an hour of a housekeeper’s work costs?”
“About fifteen hundred, probably.”
“Then calculate it yourself. Sixty hours at fifteen hundred. Ninety thousand. Vera did everything for free. And you still scolded her for butter that wasn’t discounted.”
Oleg opened his mouth and closed it again. He had nothing to say.
“Your father also thought at first that a salary solved everything. Then he got wiser. You’re thirty-seven, Oleg. It’s about time.”
She hung up. Tamara Pavlovna did not like long conversations.
Oleg came home earlier than usual. Lyosha was doing homework in his room. Vera was sitting in the kitchen with a cooled mug of tea and a book.
He sat down opposite her. Placed his phone on the table with the spreadsheet open.
“I calculated everything.”
Vera raised her eyes and looked at him without the slightest surprise.
“I know. I calculated everything before I suggested it.”
Of course. An accountant.
Oleg rubbed the bridge of his nose. That habit gave him away every time he did not know how to begin a difficult conversation.
“I was a fool, Ver. Not just this month. All along. I thought that because I earned more, it meant I contributed more. But you contributed three times as much. Just not in money.”
Vera set the book aside.
“I don’t need you to pay me for cleaning. I need you to see it. Just to see what I do. And not treat it like something that happens by itself.”
He nodded. He did not say “sorry,” because Vera did not like empty words, and they both knew it. Instead, he stood up, turned on the kettle, and brewed her a fresh mug of tea. With mint, the way she liked it.
A small gesture. But behind it stood an understanding that had not existed during all ten years of their marriage.
In the morning, Oleg woke up at six. While Vera was sleeping, he found a recipe for syrniki online. Cottage cheese, an egg, two spoonfuls of flour, a pinch of sugar. It sounded simple.
He covered the whole kitchen in mess. Dropped the bag of flour. Burned his finger on the frying pan. But by seven, there was a plate of crooked syrniki on the table, burnt on one side.
Lyosha came out of his room and froze in the doorway when he saw the plate.
“Dad, did you cook them yourself?”
“Come on, sit down,” Oleg nodded toward the chair and pushed the plate closer.
Vera appeared a couple of minutes later. She looked over the flour-smeared countertop, the crooked syrniki, and her husband wearing her apron backwards.
“A little too salty,” she said after trying one.
Oleg froze with the spatula in his hand.
“But tasty,” Vera added, reaching for a second one.
Oleg sat down beside them. Lyosha chewed and swung his legs under the table. Outside the window, the March sun was rising, filling the kitchen with pale, still-cold light.
They canceled the separate budget that same day. Not because the experiment had failed. But because it had worked exactly the way Vera had intended.
She had known in advance. She had calculated every step, every ruble, every hour spent. With accounting precision.
And Oleg had simply signed the contract without reading the fine print.
