The Last Block Party

I'm Stacey Zimmer, twenty-eight years old, and I spent last September alone on my porch with a glass of wine and a spreadsheet open on my laptop. That tells you most of what you need to know about me.

The spreadsheet was a budget. The wine was cheap. The block party happened every year without me, across the green, six identical colonials facing six identical grills, and I watched it the way you watch a nature documentary. Interesting animals. Not my habitat.

The divorce was final a year and a month before that. Married at twenty-four, done at twenty-seven. Two years of marriage, one year of separation and lawyers, and then suddenly the house on the cul-de-sac was mine and mine alone, which sounds like freedom and mostly felt like a very quiet Sunday that never ended.

So there I was, porch, wine, laptop. Fireflies starting up in the hedges. Kids yelling somewhere near the bounce house. And then, of course, her.

You've met someone like Selina Burgess. Everybody has. The woman who runs the HOA sign-up sheet like it's a military op. Who shows up at your door with a clipboard and a smile that means you're already volunteering. She'd been on the street two years by then, and in two years she'd learned my name, my trash schedule, and exactly which buttons to push.

"Zimmer!" she bellowed from the middle of the green. "You did not sign up for a side dish!"

I looked at my laptop. I looked at my wine. I looked at her.

"It's on the sign-up sheet that I'm not bringing anything," I called back. "I paid the twenty dollars. That's the buyout option."

"There is no buyout option!"

"It's literally on the sheet, Selina."

She stomped across the lawn toward my porch. She was thirty-one that September, built like she still did her morning runs, because she did, I could hear her at 6 a.m., and she had a beer in one hand and that clipboard in the other. Of course the clipboard. She brought the clipboard to a party.

Whole block watching. Michael Bentley by the grill, Tyrone Hobbs, her friend visiting for the weekend, grinning into his cooler like it was TV. The Furlong kids frozen mid-tag. Everyone.

"Buyout option," she said, climbing my porch steps. "Show me."

"Fine." I turned the laptop. Scrolled. There it was, cell C14. Contribution waiver, $20, Stacey Zimmer. I'd typed it myself, in April, when I still thought I could opt out of the neighborhood politely.

She read it. She read it again. Her jaw did a thing.

"You put a buyout clause in my sign-up sheet."

"It's not your sheet. It's the association's sheet. You're vice president."

"Acting vice president, while Michael has his knee thing, and I did not approve this." She pointed at the screen with the clipboard. "This is why nobody trusts bankers."

"This is why nobody trusts HOA people. You take twenty dollars and then show up at my house anyway."

"Because it's a party, Stacey. You don't buy your way out of a party. You show up. You bring a seven layer dip. You talk to your neighbors."

"I'm watching my neighbors right now. From a respectful distance."

"You're hiding on a porch with a spreadsheet. On a Saturday. In September."

And that landed somewhere it wasn't supposed to land, and I hated her a little for it. She saw it land, too. I could tell, because she softened maybe ten percent, which for Selina was practically a hug.

"Look," she said, quieter. "The potato salad thing isn't important. The showing up thing is. You've been up here every year since I moved in. I keep a list. That's a joke, I don't keep a list." A pause. "I keep a list."

"Get off my porch."

She didn't get off my porch. She sat down on my top step instead, set her beer on the rail, and looked out at the party like she owned it, which in every way that mattered, she did. Michael's laugh boomed from the grill. Somebody's dog stole a bun.

"You could just come sit," she said, not looking at me. "Eat something that isn't takeout. One hour. If it's awful, you come back up here and I'll never mention it again. Not once. Cross my heart."

"Why do you even care?"

She took a pull of her beer and took her time answering.

"Because I've been the new person on a street full of people who already know each other, and it sucks, and I promised myself I'd never let anybody else on this block sit on a porch alone during the party." She glanced back at me. "Also you're fun to argue with and I've run out of people who argue back."

"That's the saddest recruitment pitch I've ever heard."

"Is it working?"

I looked at my spreadsheet. Twelve columns, all balanced, all useless. I closed the laptop.

"One hour," I said. "And I'm not bringing a side dish."

"You're bringing a side dish."

"I am not bringing a seven layer dip at six o'clock."

"Then bring chips. Even a banker can operate a bag of chips."

* * *

So that's how I ended up on the green with a bag of tortilla chips and a container of the world's most average grocery store salsa, sitting at a folding table between the Hendersons and the Delgados, being asked three times in ten minutes whether I was seeing anyone. I wasn't. I said so with a smile and it was mostly true that the smile was fine.

The evening did what those evenings do. Burgers, kids, someone's bluetooth speaker fighting with someone else's. The light went long and gold and then blue. Fireflies thick in the hedges. It was, I admit it, nice. Selina checked on me exactly twice, which I could tell was her version of restraint, and both times I stuck my tongue out at her and both times she grinned like she'd won something.

Then Michael walked away from his grill with a very particular walk. You learn that walk on a street with an HOA. The walk of a man carrying news.

"Attention, everyone, small announcement." He held up both hands. "We are out of propane."

A groan went around the green. Half the burgers were still pink. The Hendersons had just put their chicken on.

"I checked the spare," Michael went on, "and the spare is empty too. I filled it in June, I don't understand it, but there it is. So. Options. The party store on Route 9 closes at eight."

It was 7:40.

And here is the thing, I heard myself before I heard myself, and my hand was already up.

"I have a full tank. In the garage. It's basically new, I've grilled maybe four times since the divorce."

The whole green turned to look at me. Selina's eyebrows went up.

"You have a full tank," she repeated.

"I bought it in July. I was going to be a person who grills. I grilled once. It made me sad."

"Why did it make you sad?"

"Because it was one burger and I ate it standing up over the sink, Selina, why do you think."

She laughed. Really laughed, head back, and I noticed I liked making that happen, which was a new and unwelcome piece of information about myself.

"Well then," Michael said, already relieved, "much obliged, Stacey. Tank's in the garage, you said?"

"I'll get it."

"No you won't," Selina said, standing, brushing chip crumbs off her jeans. "That thing's forty pounds and you've had wine. I'll carry it. Where's your garage?"

"I can carry a tank, Selina. I carry my own groceries."

"Groceries come in bags with handles. This comes in a tank with no handles and a bad center of gravity." She was already walking toward my driveway, waving me along. "Come unlock the door. Tyrone, watch the grill, don't let anybody touch Michael's tongs, he's weird about the tongs."

So I walked her up my driveway in the dark, fumbled my house key, and let us both into the garage. The tank sat where it had sat since July, dusty, full, a little monument to the person I'd briefly planned to become.

"There it is," I said.

She picked it up like it was a laundry basket, one hand. Show off.

"Okay, that's insulting," I said.

"I'm a show off. It's one of my flaws. I have others, I'll give you the full list later." She shifted it to her hip and looked at me in the dim garage light. "You're really coming back down there? After? Because Michael's going to want to talk to you about the propane for forty minutes, he loves propane, it's his second favorite thing after his knee."

"I said one hour. I'm at forty minutes. I can do twenty more."

"Forty-five minutes," she said, hefting the tank. "Round up for the dip."

"There was no dip."

"There will be. Next year. I already decided."

I stood there in my own garage holding my keys, and some small, traitorous part of me believed her.

She took two steps toward the door and the tank shifted on her hip, and she reached to steady it, and her foot caught the stack of moving boxes I still hadn't unpacked. The ones marked KITCHEN, MISC, that have been mocking me since I moved in.

She went sideways. I dropped my keys and grabbed her arm with both hands and we did this little staggering waltz across the garage floor, her and the tank and me, until she found her balance.

"Okay," she said, breathing hard. "Okay. New flaw. Gravity."

"You okay?"

"Pride's bruised. Tank's fine. Boxes are martyrs now." She looked down at the flattened cardboard under her heel and then up at me, and she didn't step back right away, and neither did I. My hands were still on her arm. Her arm was warm and solid and there was a muscle in it that I could feel doing its job.

The garage was quiet. Down on the green somebody laughed at something. A firefly got in through the gap under the door and blinked around us like it was confused about the venue.

"Stacey," she said.

"Yeah."

"You can let go of my arm."

"Right. Sorry." I let go. My hands didn't know what to do after that, so I picked up my keys, which at least gave them a job.

She looked at me a second longer in that bad light. Then she shifted the tank. "Come on, banker. Twenty minutes doesn't spend itself."

* * *

Michael did in fact want to talk about propane. He talked about propane for a while. I learned things about propane. Selina stood next to me the whole time with her arms crossed and this small smug expression, like she'd personally engineered the whole evening, tank and all.

Tyrone took over my chips like they were communal property. He was easy to talk to, Tyrone. Asked nothing about my love life, which put him ahead of the Hendersons by a full lap.

"Selina says you do spreadsheets," he said.

"I do spreadsheets."

"For fun?"

"Not for fun. For survival. There's a difference and it's very small."

He laughed and handed me back three chips. "She likes you. She doesn't do that fond voice for everybody."

"She does not have a fond voice for me. She has a voice for me, and it's mostly insults."

"Yeah," he said, watching her argue with Michael about the tongs. "That's the fond voice."

I didn't have an answer for that, so I ate my chips.

The party did what parties do. It thinned. The Hendersons rolled up their chairs. The Delgados herded kids toward bath time. Michael gave a closing speech nobody asked for, and then it was nine o'clock and the green was a mess of cups and napkins and one sad folding table, and it was just us.

Just me and Selina, bag in hand, working the lawn under the one streetlight.

"You don't have to do this," I said. "You've put in your hour and then some."

"And leave you alone with a hundred cups? You'd alphabetize them."

"I would not alphabetize them."

"You'd think about it."

I would think about it. I picked up cups and let it go.

We worked in a rhythm for a while. Her side, my side, meeting in the middle. The fireflies were back, slower now, like even they were winding down. Somebody's speaker still played something faint from an open window across the circle.

"You know what I thought, when you moved in?" she said, out of nowhere. She didn't stop picking up cups.

"What."

"That you were stuck-up."

I stopped. "Excuse me?"

"Stuck-up. You'd stand on your porch in your little cardigan and look at the street like it owed you money. You