The Shared Umbrella
The rain started without warning, the way it does in early summer, and the bus stop on Huaihai Road had no shelter worth the name. Lin was holding a folded newspaper over her head, which was working about as well as a paper hat in a hurricane.
Wei noticed her first because she was laughing at her own situation, not complaining about it. He stepped closer, opened a cheap blue folding umbrella he had bought for eleven yuan at a convenience store, and tilted it until it covered them both.
'You will have to walk small,' he said. 'This thing is not exactly built for two.' She did, and somehow they crossed four blocks that way, talking about nothing — the bus number that never came, a dog waiting under a shop awning, the smell of someone frying scallion pancakes. When her stop arrived, he pressed the umbrella into her hand and got off into the rain.
She tried to give it back. He was already walking away, one hand raised, half turned, grinning. 'Keep it,' he called back. 'You clearly need it more than I do.'
It took Lin three weeks to track him down, mostly by loitering at the same bus stop at the same hour with the same borrowed umbrella. When he finally appeared, soaking wet again, she held it out to him. He looked at the umbrella, then at her, and said the line they still repeat every anniversary: 'You know, you could have just kept it.'
'And you,' she always answers, 'could have bought a bigger one.'
