Twenty-two years selling party supplies. Zero invitations to parties.

Not “few.” Zero. It’s a clean number. Elegant, even. My accountant says it’s the only figure in my life with that kind of consistency, and she says it in a tone.

Pike’s Party Palace sits in the Sunrise Plaza strip mall between a vape shop called Clouds R Us and a bail bondsman named Gary. Gary gets invited to parties. Gary, who once accepted a pontoon boat as collateral and then lost the pontoon boat. Gary’s entire social media presence is him in unstructured linen doing the worm at other people’s weddings. Meanwhile I am the man who at 6:40 on a Saturday morning ties two hundred balloons into an arch shaped, at the client’s explicit and repeated insistence, like a uterus—for something called a birth-positive brunch—and then goes home and eats leftover lo mein standing over the sink like a raccoon with a mortgage.

I know what you’re thinking. Maybe there’s a reason nobody invites me. Maybe I’m the problem.

Sure. Possibly. But hear me out: I’m not bad at parties. I’m adjacent to them. Professionally. The way a coroner is adjacent to people. Nobody invites the coroner to the barbecue. They just want the paperwork and for him to stop making eye contact.

You want to know what I’ve seen? I’ve seen humanity at its rawest, and it was a woman named Brindsley negotiating over forty-eight cupcake liners like she was extracting a hostage. I’ve watched a grown man cry in Aisle 3 because we were out of gold “4” candles and his daughter was turning four and—he explained, wetly—”she only turns four once.” Sir. That’s true of every number. That’s how numbers work.

And yes. The Kowalskis. Everyone wants to talk about the Kowalskis.

Their gender reveal took out four acres of the Meachum property and a horse named Cinnamon. Cinnamon lived. Cinnamon is fine. Cinnamon has a verified account and a lucrative relationship with an oat supplement brand and more followers than my store has ever had. But I’m the guy who sold them the powder, so now at the county fair people look at me like I personally frightened that horse.

It was a boy, incidentally. Nobody remembers that part. They remember the horse.

She came in on a Thursday with the specific energy of a woman who had recently changed her locks.

“I need supplies for a party.”

“You’ve come to the right place. Statistically.”

She had a list on the back of a legal document. I want to be clear that I’m not the kind of man who notices things, but I noticed that. You don’t write a shopping list on a court filing unless you’re making a point to somebody, and the somebody wasn’t me, and I was fine with that. Mostly.

“Everything in here that says Congratulations,” she said.

“All of it?”

“All of it.”

“Ma’am, that’s—that’s a genre. That’s forty percent of the store.”