As a kid, I was fascinated by balloons. I even bought a booklet once about making balloon animals. My grandfather used to say that loving your work is the key to happiness.

Every Sunday, I visit the Children’s Hospital and make balloon animals for the kids. I had small plastic business cards made and put one in each balloon. That’s how I met Jennifer, a wedding planner and my best customer. She and her husband Mathew were there with their 8-year-old, who had a broken arm.

I must have sold her a mountain of white balloons and wedding supplies, but I never got an invitation to the reception. Naturally, the wedding planner gets all the attention.

After eight years of selling party supplies, I still haven’t been invited to a single party.

My accountant jokes that’s the only number in my life that never changes, and she always laughs when she says it.

Palmer’s Party Palace is in the Blossom Valley Plaza strip mall, right between CVS Pharmacy and Gary’s Pawn and Thrift Shop. Gary gets invited to parties. Once, he accepted a kayak from a client who needed cash since he didn’t want anyone to know if he sold it online.

Gary’s whole social media is just him in a leisure suit and white shoes, doing the Macarena at other people’s weddings. I can’t help but wonder why he gets all those invites. (Yes, he reminds me of Cousin Eddie in Christmas Vacation.)

Meanwhile, I’m the one up at 6:30 on a Saturday morning, tying two hundred balloons into an arch shaped like a uterus for a birth-positive brunch, just as the client wants. Then I go home that evening and eat leftover Popeye’s chicken over the sink.

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

Maybe. But honestly, I’m not bad at parties. I’m a decent-looking guy—at least Jennifer thinks so. She always says that if she weren’t married, we’d be the talk of the town. And in our coastal town, everyone knows everyone and what happened on Saturday night.

I was engaged once, but never married. She found someone else the day before our wedding—another woman, actually. I’m sure Jennifer has shared that story with all the lonely hearts in the neighborhood.

Jennifer's husband Matt and I have become friends too. We went crabbing in the Bay a few days ago.

I told him, “You want to know what I’ve seen? I’ve seen humanity at its rawest. There was a lady named Brenda, negotiating over forty-eight cupcake liners like she was handling a hostage situation.

"I’ve seen a grown man cry in Aisle 3 because we were out of gold number '4' candles and his daughter was turning four. I gave him four regular candles, spelling it out for free.”

And yes, the Cartwrights. Everyone loves to talk about them.

Their gender reveal party destroyed two acres of their property, all because a horse named Cinnamon got scared. Cinnamon survived. She’s fine.

Cinnamon was even in a movie and has more followers than my store ever did. But since I sold them the exploding balloons with powder, people at the county fair look at me like I’m the one who scared the horse.

By the way, it was a boy. Nobody remembers that, though. All anyone talks about is the horse covered in blue powder. 

Mark says, “Jack, permit me to mention to Jennifer you’re equipped like a horse. We’ll see if that gets you invited to some of these events. In fact, she’ll be on the phone tonight with the lonely hearts club in town.”

"I'm not sure, Mark. I have been so shy about approaching women. Don't get me wrong, I'm one of these closet Hallmark Channel people; I love romance, it's just hard for me to open up and give a compliment. I'm afraid she would think me a pervert or something of the sort."

"Look, Jack, Jennifer tells me you're one of the kindest men she has ever met. She often has tried to set you up on a date with her friends."

"Yeah, but you just hit the nail on the head about the reason I'm so shy about approaching women. Being well endowed on my manhood, I'm afraid they'll freak out "

"You mean as your fiancée did? Believe me, Jack, running off with another woman saved you some grief later in life. It had nothing to do with you." 

About a week later, she came in on a Thursday with the specific energy of a woman who had recently changed her locks. I guessed she was in her mid-forties and wore a nice short dress that showed more thigh than a teen cheerleader. You'd think she was headed out to a nightclub rather than shopping for party supplies. 

"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 ledger-size paper 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 actually a whole genre. That's forty percent of the store." 

"Then I'll need a cart." 

I got her a cart. She started sweeping banners in the cart, like a woman clearing a table at an estate sale.

"Also a piñata," she said, not raising her eyes.

"Shape?"

"Do you have a man?" 

There was a pause. It went on a beat longer than a pause should be.

"...In a piñata sense," I said. 

"Obviously in a piñata sense." She was smiling now, and it was not a nice smile, and I want to be honest with you: I liked it enormously.

"We've got a donkey, a unicorn, and a yellow gentleman.  I'm legally prohibited from describing further." 

"The donkey." She said.

"Excellent choice. It's got structural strength. Two layers of pulp, real strength in the seams. The donkey can take a beating and still keep its shape. The unicorn falls apart after one hit, but honestly? That's the unicorn's fault."

She looked at me for a second too long. 

"You really do this every day," she said. "Sell people the best night of their lives." 

"I sell the raw materials. What they do with them is their business. It's like a gun store, but with more glitter and a worse return policy." 

She leaned on the counter. The counter is thirty-one years old and has survived a flood, but it made a sound...like my mind races and hopes I have insurance. 

"You ever go?"

"To parties?" 

"To parties."

"I'm more of a supply chain."

She wanted to see the donkey in person, which meant going into the stockroom. I unlocked it, even though, as a business owner with a laminated safety policy, I never do that for customers.

The stockroom at Palmer's Party Palace smells like latex and cheap baby powder. I have spent a decade back there doing inventory and never once considered it romantic, which tells you approximately everything about my instincts.

She found the donkey. She held it at arm's length and assessed it the way a person assesses a suit, or a horse, or a husband.

"He's smug," she said.

"That's just the eyelashes."

"No, I know smug. I was married to smug for eleven years."

Then she set the donkey down on a pallet of paper plates, and turned, and looked at me with nothing in her face resembling eyelashes.

"Jack," she said. (Palmer's is on the sign. Jack's a bit deeper cut.)

"Lock it."

I have hauled crates through that room for eight years and never once heard my name said in there like it was a decision somebody had made.

I locked the door. My hands were not steady, and I want that in the record, because everything after this is going to sound like I knew what I was doing.

She kissed me against the shelving unit that holds the birthday candles, and the shelving unit is bolted to the wall, thank God, because we tested it. She kissed like a woman who had spent eleven years being told to be patient. Her hands were already at my collar. My hands were somewhere between useless and everywhere. 

"You're shaking," she said, into my jaw.

"Inventory's a physical job."

"Shut up, Jack." 

I fell silent as she removed my shirt from my belt, and my routine unraveled. After eight years of celibacy, I found myself with a woman who disregarded any boundaries I might have set.

I got her up onto the counting table. It's a folding table. It's rated for four hundred pounds, and I have never been more grateful to a piece of furniture in my life. She wrapped her legs around me and pulled, and the sound I made was undignified, and she laughed against my mouth, low and delighted, the way you laugh when something's going exactly the way you scheduled it.

Her dress had a zipper. I found it gracefully. I found it eventually. She helped, which is to say she took over, which is to say she got it done in three seconds and looked at me like Bless you, sweetheart.

Then there was skin, and the room was cold, and she wasn't, and I put my mouth where I'd been thinking about putting it since she said the word piñata, and she stopped narrating. That's how I knew. She went quiet, and her hand came up into my hair and closed, hard, and for the first time in eight years somebody in that building needed something from me that wasn't a receipt.

The confetti cannons went off. Not by me. I would characterize the confetti cannons as a mutual outcome. One of them discharged on impact, because they are pressure-triggered. After all, I sell a quality product, and forty dollars of metallic star confetti came down over both of us like the world's cheapest benediction, and she didn't even open her eyes. She just said "don't stop," which, respectfully, ma'am, I was not going to; I had waited eight years and a pallet of paper plates for this.

I want to state for the record that the helium tank was in no way involved. The tank's name is Marjorie, after my ex-fiancé, because she is cold, extremely heavy, and can make me sound ridiculous with very little effort.

Twenty minutes later, I was picking star confetti out of my collar, my ear, and places I won't mention. Donna—yes, I had known her name by then; we're not animals—was calmly buttoning up, like someone who doesn't feel regret in her body.

"Saturday," she said. "Eight. My house."

And reader: nobody had said those words to me since the Obama administration.

I bought a nice shirt. I'm not proud. I stood in Kohl's Department Store for fifty minutes holding two identical shirts.

Here's what I learned Saturday at 8:15 p.m., standing in Donna's living room holding a beer I didn't want, while a speaker the size of a filing cabinet played a song that appeared to be mostly an alarm: 

I hate parties. 

I have hated parties for eight years. They're loud. They're sticky. There's always a guy named Bert. The food is arranged to be photographed and not eaten. Somebody's cousin corners you about bitcoin. It's a room full of people trying to impress each other, at volume, while a man in the corner quietly worries about whether the streamers are load-bearing.

Turns out I didn't want to go to parties. Rather,  I wanted to be asked. 

Those are different desires, and I'd had them confused for almost a decade, which is a long time to be wrong about something you can buy wholesale.

So I did what I do. I found the kitchen. 

The donkey was hanging over the island, decapitated and gutted, but still full of candy. They had quit early; they always quit early. Nobody commits anymore.

Donna came in with two glasses and no ice.

"Kevin's dead," she said. 

"Kevin?"

"The donkey. I named him after my husband." 

I looked up at what was left of him: legs, dignity, a hollow torso still stuffed with Bit-O-honey bars nobody wanted. 

"Structurally," I said, "he lasted longer than the marriage."

She laughed so hard she had to put a glass down.

Then she looked at me, and her face did something honest, which frankly I wasn't braced for.

"You don't like parties," she said.

"No." 

"You've never liked parties."

"Not once."

"Then why does it bother you so much that nobody invites you?"

And because it was late, and because there was confetti in places confetti has no business being, and because I am forty-one and out of moves, I told her the truth.

"Because I like being asked." 

Donna considered this. Out in the living room, something fell over, and forty people cheered about it.

"Okay," she said. She took my glass out of my hand and set it on the counter next to Kevin's head. "Then I'm asking. Leave with me." 

"It's your house."

"Jack," she said, "keep up."

Here's the thing about helium. It's the second most abundant element in the universe, but we're still running out of it. It escapes. Every balloon I have ever sold—about four hundred thousand, more or less—is now drifting through the upper atmosphere, doing nothing for anyone, gone forever, just because someone wanted a room to look nice for six hours. Well, except for that guy somewhere over the Pacific in a lawn chair with 12 of my biggest helium balloons. (Don’t worry, they attached a line and towed him back to shore.)

I think about that constantly. It's the great tragedy of my industry, and I've never once mentioned it to a customer.

I didn't think about it at all that night.

Gary saw us pull out of the driveway, as her head disappeared, resting in my lap, and Gary waved.

Gary can keep the kayak.