A woman and her husband reflect on their twenty-five year marriage. “Were they happy? Yes, of course. They were at least as happy as everybody else.” They had worked through issues that many people do: “health scares, teen-agers, money problems.” They had endured change. The woman has lost her job and her husband doesn’t like his anymore, now that the culture is almost entirely digital (he works in educational publishing). The husband comes home and asks for dinner. The wife says, “You know what? I’m not even going to answer that.” She can hear her mother-in-law in her head sometimes, saying what she doesn’t have the guts to. When her husband cuts himself a giant slice of birthday cake for dinner, her mother-in-law says, You don’t need that. Their son is applying to colleges, and he refuses his parents’ help, even though his mother is a college counselor. He has waited until the last minute to apply early decision to Brown. He skips school to work on his application, and his mother thinks about how her clients had submitted theirs already. “They had completed the process a week ago. Meanwhile, her son holed up in his room.” Because he refused her help, she slides a list of topics to avoid under his door, which includes “death of pet,” “divorce of parents,” “sports injury, drugs, alcohol, mental health, cancer,” and “a challenge you have overcome, if it’s one of the above.” She thinks about how, because of his lack of suffering, “a kid like Nate just couldn’t win.” All he could do was write a good essay “with wit, humility, and self-knowledge, and hope that someone would take a second look at him.” Her son comes down for dinner, and the woman asks him again if he wants her help. He says no. Her husband is more optimistic; he thinks, “[W]hat if, by some chance, Nate had done it right?...What if his essays sparkled with originality…and he got into Brown without adults?”

Time passes. The husband is thinking about quitting his job because the books he used to publish are being replaced by videos and interactive activities. He drafts his resignation letter, but his wife encourages him to find another job before he quits the one he has. A friend calls to wish them a happy anniversary. She asks how they are going to celebrate, but they haven’t planned a celebration. The woman and her husband bicker a bit about this, and then he tells her their son didn’t get into Brown. When he comes home, they comfort him, but then the woman tells him they should plan his other applications. He declines her help again. The husband gets laid off from work. He leaves and goes to buy some flowers to belatedly celebrate their anniversary. The clerk suggests roses, but he chooses “an overpriced ficus standing in a ceramic pot, an entire tree with a slender gray trunk and abundant fluttering leaves.” The clerk ties a ribbon around it and the man brings it home on the train. He wonders “Who bought a ficus in the city and took it to New Jersey?” He bought the tree instead of the flowers, he reasons, because “a tree had roots. It was alive.”