Flood Party

By the time the magician’s dove landed in the queso, I’d already decided that birthdays were a genre of performance art I was ill-equipped to perform. It was my fourth party of the day. The birthday boy, Wyatt, had two front teeth on perpetual sabbatical and a battle cry that could curdle hope. The magician was an Uber driver in a cape, whose finale, apparently, was a dove-shaped stain under a puddle of nacho cheese. The dove, a co-conspirator, looked deeply offended. A jury of mothers clustered, while the fathers hid in the kitchen, texting their silent, existential screams into a group chat.

I worked for my mother’s company, Rent-a-Rite Events, a name that sounded like a legal threat. My job was to distribute portable disappointments: balloons that lost their will to live, chairs that wobbled with existential dread, and brownies solid enough to be pavers. At nineteen, I was legally allowed to drive a car but couldn’t rent one. I was a master of the helium-spine smile and could swallow humiliations in bulk. It was training for my future profession, a job I knew would involve love and disasters.

Party number five was a “rebirth party” at the community center, a room that reeked of forgotten basketballs. The client, Mark, wanted “solstice vibes” and “pine forest scent.” My mother, a purveyor of poetic injustice, had provided a banner that read, “Happy Birth Day, " due to a bulk discount.” I tried to look at the phrase through Mark’s eyes, a man who was leaving a “transformational organization” that, with the audacity of a casual blasphemer, published a podcast instead of calling itself a cult.

That’s when the community center double-booked us with a memorial service.

Jude arrived with the memorial. He described it as a package deal, a grief-shaped IKEA kit. He wore black jeans and a white shirt with sleeves rolled to the precise point where work and art intersected. His expression was a carefully constructed peace. He worked for Ahearn & Sons Funeral Home, an enterprise that sounded like a generational curse. He had a square jaw, reluctantly inherited like an heirloom no one bothered to polish.

“Hi,” he said. “I think we are either mortal enemies or co-hosts.”

I gestured to my pine-scented terror. “Welcome to the crossover episode.”

We navigated the logistics with a kind of improvisational chaos. Rebirth at two in the rec hall, memorial at four in the adjacent classroom. Separate playlists, a single coffee urn. His boss had one non-negotiable rule: no balloons near the casket because “Grief doesn’t need latex.”

“You’d be surprised,” I said. “Grief needs everything.”

He gave me a half-smile, a beam of shade. I filed it away under “original,” though I would later learn it was one of many, and that I was simply a novice in the face of his artistic genius.

Mark arrived in linen and sandalwood, his eyes still wet with the relief of a man who’d just swum up from the bottom of a lake. We dimmed the lights. Against the laminated DO NOT LIGHT CANDLES sign, I lit the pine-scented ones. My mother believed rules were merely seasonal suggestions.

Halfway through the chanting, someone leaned on a wall switch. The room was flooded with a light so fluorescent it could have been used to identify tax evasion strategies. The playlist cut mid-gong. A very small adult coughed a puff of pine. The door to the adjacent classroom opened, and a dozen people spilled out, faces as fragile as paper lozenges. A woman held a tray of cookies like a life raft.

Jude moved first. He moved with a slow, graceful precision. He dimmed the lights, muffled the shouting, and handed the woman with the cookies a chair. In that moment of perfect stillness, I became acutely aware of my sticky hands and the single most important question of my life: whether my guidance counselor's use of "gap year" had been a diagnosis.

By the time the two groups had been redirected, when the pine smoke had thinned and Mark had been reborn without catching fire, I pulled a folded cupcake out of my pocket. It was chocolate. I offered it to the air between us.

“Confession,” I said. “I steal one lousy dessert from every job. It’s my tax.”

He took a bite. “Taxation without representation is tyranny,” he said gravely. “Happy… day.”

I pointed at the banner. “Birth day,” I said. The universe had written a joke, and we were the only ones nerdy enough to laugh.

After that, we kept running into each other. Our small town, a place that held all its events in rooms with a faint, residual odor of gravy, was our stage. I saw Jude at the hospital, delivering a suit bag and a coffee to a man who had just lost his mother. We exchanged a nod, a silent apology to the universe for stacking joy on top of grief like bunk beds and calling it economy.

He saw me at a divorce party, where the cake read CONGRATULATIONS ON YOUR MISTAKE. I was carrying out the trash when Jude appeared, flicking ash off a cigarette he hadn’t lit.

“You smoke?” I asked.

“I carry one,” he said. “It’s my idea of a boundary. When someone tries to trauma-dump, I take the cigarette out and say, ‘This is above my pay grade.’”

“What’s your pay grade?”

“Black jeans,” he said.

I laughed in a way that was new for me—uncautious, unladylike, a crack in an ice tray flooding a better version of myself into existence.

He told me his plan, which was to say he didn’t have one, and had named that honesty a plan. He’d dropped out of art school after his dad had a stroke, and now he worked at the funeral home. He was good at the quiet tasks: pinning corsages, guiding errant aunts. He hated the sales pitches where grief was itemized. He kept a sketchbook in the prep room, a sacred text he never opened before noon.

I told him my plan, which was to escape my mother’s gravitational pull before I started sounding like her. She believed in upsells the way others believed in God. She would interrupt a surgery call to pitch a gold-tier package. Her spine was a series of perfectly executed algorithms: if X, then Y, no exceptions for a dove in queso.

We started a series of small, accidental rituals. Late-night ice creams in the parking lot. Sharing the worst request of the week. We made a game of renaming events: Gender Reveals became Probability Parties. Weddings were Contracted Optimism. Memorials were Rearranged Attendance.

One Saturday in October, we faced a triple-booked catastrophe at the community center. A science fair, a first birthday, and a living wake. A storm descended. The power blinked off, then on, then off again, like a bad lie. The bounce house softened like a sigh. Children shrieked. Someone pulled the fire alarm, and the sprinklers came on.

I sprinted in the rain, sliding on the slick tile. Jude moved in the opposite rhythm—slower, precise—protecting Mr. Torrez’s photo, guiding the old man’s wife to a dry chair. I admired him the way you admire a well-placed semicolon: the thing you didn’t know you needed that makes everything make sense.

We combined the three events. We called it The Flood Party. We put the science fair in the gym. The first birthday migrated to the stage. Mr. Torrez, enthroned on a stack of gym mats, listened to his daughter testify that he’d carried her through a winter by selling his record collection. A physics teacher explained fluid dynamics by reference to the sprinklers, causing three ten-year-olds to convert to science. The baby smeared frosting into his ear solemnly. It was chaos. It was better than any plan.

Afterward, in damp clothes in the back hallway, we sat on overturned mop buckets and split a cupcake that tasted like a negotiation with God. I looked at him and felt an unambiguous thing: my insides walking toward a door they’d made for themselves.

“It feels like a birth,” I said, surprising myself. “Not the screaming hospital kind. The part after. The quiet where you’re new and don’t know it yet.”

He wiped a streak of frosting off my chin with his thumb. The fluorescent light hummed above us. Outside, someone dragged a wet trash bag, and the sound it made was the opposing argument for romance. It didn’t matter.

“We’re terrible at parties,” he said.

“I’m unionized,” I said. “You?”

“I’m management,” he said. “We could negotiate a kiss.”

We did. It was not fireworks. It was quieter: a first-rung ladder rung, a hand on a wet wall. The sense of an elevator stopping exactly level with the floor, a space made for new departures.

By November, I told my mother I was leaving Rent-a-Rite. I did it in the van with the heat on and my seatbelt off—never do both, she always said, which is why I did both. She took it well for a person who believed Thanksgiving centerpieces could solve climate change.

“Fine,” she said. “Be an… EMT? A firefighter? A clown philosopher?”

“Emergency medical technician,” I said, and felt a calm I hadn’t had since I learned to tie a bow that didn’t look like a failed rabbit ear. “I’m good at showing up.”

“You’re good at carrying chairs,” she said.

“Same skill set,” I said. “Just heavier things.”

Jude sat with me while I filled out the application. He rested his chin on my shoulder, not reading my answers, just reading me. He didn’t tell me I would be great. He didn’t say the future glowed. He passed me a highlighter like a communion wafer and kissed his teeth when I misspelled “trauma” (I always want an extra U, to honor the way it hangs around).

We slipped into a shape that looked like adulthood when you squint. We carried chairs on weekends to pay for my night classes and his art supplies. He started a series of charcoal portraits of people at the edge of laughing. He never showed them to anyone but me. I kept a stash of granola bars and a clean pair of socks like a talisman against the world’s damp surprises. When we fought, we fought like people who could assemble grief out of component parts—carefully, without over-tightening.

Here’s what a black comedy romance looks like from the inside: you joke about urn sizes and the ethics of piñatas. You learn who takes a plate of cookies at a wake. You arrive late to a movie because you had to retrieve a mother-of-the-bride from the bathroom because her spanx had become a medical issue. You learn that love is logistics plus disrespect for impossible odds.

It was my birthday in January. My mother does not believe in small gestures. She texted me six cake emojis and left a voicemail composed entirely of instructions. Jude said, “What do you want?”

“Less party,” I said. “More… parking lot.”

We drove to the 24-hour laundromat, because warmth is free there and hum counts as music. We spread a blanket across the trunk of his car and ate cold pizza while our clothes spun inside. He handed me a small wrapped object.

“Practical,” he warned.

It was a headlamp. I laughed too hard. He kissed me in a way that misunderstood me perfectly.

“Your turn,” I said, offering him a box I’d kept under my seat.

It was a hem tool for his suit pants, a thing that looked like nothing and helped with everything.

“Practical,” I said.

He fitted it in his palm like it belonged there. “You get me,” he said. “You do not fix me.”

We toasted with root beers. On the laundromat TV, a talk show host shuffled cards and pretended to control the future. A little girl in a unicorn sweatshirt pulled her mother’s sleeve and pointed to the dryers. I understood why people tell their secrets in places like this: because the machines take the beatings for you.

After a while, he said, “Do you ever think about…?” and then he didn’t finish.

“About whether we should be having a bigger party?” I said. “An audience dressed as hypotheses?”

“About birth,” he said. “Like… the moment you noticed you were new.”

I nodded. “The hallway during the Flood Party,” I said. “Everything had gone wrong. And I realized I wanted that job—to walk into rooms that had gone wrong and not make it worse.”

He nodded like his neck was agreeing twice. “Prep room,” he said. “First time I tied a tie for a man who couldn’t sit up. He looked like my grandfather if my grandfather had ever paid for his own haircut. I wasn’t scared. That surprised me. I don’t think I was new. I think I was the person I’d been avoiding.”

The dryer stopped. The clothes held their heat like a breath you could keep. Outside, the parking lot shone with frost, and the moon did not go above its pay grade by commenting.

He reached for my hand. His palm was calloused where work lives. Mine was sticky with pizza grease. They were both good textures.

We didn’t make a pact. We didn’t promise to be each other’s everything. We promised to show up and keep the jokes dark and the flashlights handy. We promised to tell each other when the plan was a fiction and the fiction was a plan we could live with.

When people ask how we met, I say, “At a party.” The joke we keep between us is that we fell in love in a world of rentals and returns. You could read that as cynical. Or you could understand it the way we do: as permission to try again, to keep the receipt but take the risk, to admit when a banner has a space in the middle and celebrate it anyway.

On the way home, we stopped at a red light that stayed red longer than felt reasonable. Jude drummed the steering wheel. The radio played a song that sounded like it had been written by an appliance. Somewhere in town, a dove went to bed smelling faintly of nacho cheese. I didn’t know what this year would invent. I knew who I wanted in the room when it did.

“Happy birthday,” he said.

“Happy birth,” I said, and pointed at the space in between. “Day.”