On day 30 of the cooling-off period, he saw her roses

The day they filed the divorce papers, Lao Song and A-mei didn't argue once.

Twelve years of marriage, and they had argued until there was no strength left for arguing. What remained was small stuff. Whether the toothpaste gets squeezed from the middle or the end. Whose parents' house on the weekend. Which after-school classes for the boy. Not one of those things was worth a divorce. Every one of them was the divorce.

The cooling-off period was thirty days. They split the flat in two: Lao Song took a small rented place near his office, A-mei stayed at home with their son. The agreement was already drafted. The flat went to her and the boy; he walked out with nothing. Friends told him to think it over. He said, "I've thought it over. This is how it goes."

For the first three weeks they were both unnervingly calm. It was the first time in twelve years Lao Song had lived alone, and only then did he understand that the word home is made of concrete objects: the entryway lamp he had always complained was too bright, the shopping list A-mei taped to the fridge, the family portrait their son had drawn — in which he was holding up a spatula, because at home he was the one who cooked.

On the twenty-eighth day he went back to the estate to collect some documents he'd left. He didn't go up. The entry-card reader at the block door was broken, and while he stood there scrolling through his phone for someone to buzz him in, he noticed the flowerbed.

There was a new row of roses in it.

He knew where they had come from. A-mei loved flowers, and in twelve years she had never managed to keep even a pothos alive. Not for lack of time — every summer they went back to the hometown for two weeks and everything on the balcony died of thirst. She had complained about it more than once: "I can't even keep a plant alive. How would I dare have a second child?" And how had he answered? "Then don't keep them. What's the big deal."

Now he stood staring at the roses and remembered that a month before they filed, she had signed up for a gardening class. He'd assumed it was a way of distracting herself. A small wooden sign at the edge of the bed had a line of a child's crooked handwriting on it: Mum's roses. Please don't pick.

A woman who couldn't keep a pothos alive had kept roses alive in the last month of her marriage.

Lao Song stood at that flowerbed for a long time. He remembered a great many moments he had dismissed with what's the big deal. She worked late; he said, "What's the big deal, everyone works." She said her back hurt; he said, "What's the big deal, put a patch on it." She said she wanted to see the sea; he said, "What's the big deal, we'll go next year." There was never a next year. Her disappointment had not accumulated in a day. It had accumulated one what's the big deal at a time.

On the thirtieth day, the last day of the cooling-off period, he stood downstairs again all evening. The roses were blooming under the streetlight, red and yellow, every one of them opening as though it had every right to.

The next morning they met outside the registry office. A-mei arrived first, the agreement in her hand. Lao Song was five minutes late, and in his hand was something else: an enrolment form. Gardening class. For two.

"You grew them," he said. "I want to learn to water them for you. Could we change the divorce into looking at the flowers one more time?"

She looked at him for a long moment, and her eyes went red. She didn't agree on the spot, and she didn't hand over the papers. She said only, "Water roses too much and the roots rot. Too little and they won't bloom. If you're going to learn, you have to remember that."

And after that? After that, the appointment outside the registry office turned into a watering class at the flowerbed every Sunday. The roses lived through that summer and bloomed into the next year. Lao Song still says what's the big deal often enough. Only the content has changed: "I won't forget the watering." "I remember everything you said."