The cheap laminate of our first kitchen table used to stain my elbows while I cut coupons. I remember the sound of the scissors—snip, snip, snip—slicing fifty cents off a box of cereal so Mark could afford the dry cleaning for his interview suit.
I supported him when he was an intern. I was the infrastructure of his ambition. I worked double shifts. I cooked beans and rice. I clipped coupons so he could buy nice suits. I made sure he looked like a million bucks while I was wearing shoes with holes in the soles.
I played the game, too. I hosted his boss for dinners. I turned cheap cuts of meat into boeuf bourguignon. I laughed at jokes that weren’t funny. I charmed the people who held his future in their hands, smoothing the path for his ascent.
We were a team. Or so I told myself. I thought I was earning equity in our future.
Then came the promotion. The big one. The corner office. The title.
I was ready to finally breathe. I was ready to shop without a calculator.
When he finally became CEO, he filed for divorce.
I sat across from him in the restaurant I had saved up to take him to for a celebration. He slid the papers across the white tablecloth.
“Why?” I asked, the word sticking in my throat. “We made it. We won.”
He looked at me with a cool, corporate detachment. He didn’t see the woman who had carried him; he saw a liability.
“‘I need a wife who fits my new tax bracket,’” he said, adjusting his cufflink.
I was too frugal. Too worn. My hands were rough from scrubbing floors, not manicured for holding champagne flutes at galas. I was a reminder of the poverty he wanted to forget.
He married a socialite. A woman who was born into the world he had just clawed his way into. She looked the part. She knew the wines. She didn’t know how to use a coupon, and that was exactly what he wanted.
I was left with the coupon binder.
I stood in the grocery aisle a month later, my scissors in hand, realizing the brutal truth. I hadn’t been his partner. I had been his stepping stone. And now that he had reached the top, he kicked me away, leaving me with nothing but the paper scraps of the sacrifices I made to build him.
