Vanessa Hartley stood in her driveway at six in the morning and counted the folding chairs she had stolen back from last year's disaster. Twenty-two. She needed forty. The block party was in nine days, and last year she had left her own neighborhood early because the potato salad ran out before her plate. This year she would host it. This year every neighbor two doors up, three doors down, and across the cul-de-sac would go home full and text her about it for a week. She walked to the side yard and checked the pit. It was a barrel smoker she had bolted to a second barrel, then to a warming box she'd built from scrap steel and a thermometer she overpaid for online. It looked like a small marketplace of hinges and chimneys. She had already run three practice briskets through it. The first one she burned to a black brick. The second was dry. The third had made her neighbor two doors up chew slowly and say, "It's fine." Her hands still smelled like the rub two days later. She had learned the recipe from a man on YouTube who never once looked at the camera. Across the street and four houses down, the single dad's pickup sat in his driveway with the bed full of dust and the rear window marked by his kid's handprints. He was outside by six-fifteen every morning, buckling the boy into the car seat, handing him a juice box, wiping something off the boy's chin. Vanessa watched him from her kitchen window while the coffee brewed. He had not come to a block party in the four years she had lived here. She had asked around. No one knew why. No one had really asked him. She understood, standing there with her twenty-two chairs, that the party could be perfect and still feel wrong to her if his chair stayed empty. That was the problem. A flyer taped to his mailbox would go in the trash with the pizza coupons. A knock on his door would feel like pressure. She did not know what would move a man who had spent four years choosing not to be moved. She poured a second cup of coffee and admitted it out loud to the empty kitchen. Then she opened a drawer and pulled out a blank card. On the front she drew, badly, a picture of herself in a swimsuit holding up a phone, because it was the kind of joke that would make a tired man laugh before he could stop himself. Inside she wrote: "Brisket's ready at four. Bring the kid. He can eat first." She signed her name and her address. She did not know yet if it would work. But she had stopped watching him through the window, and that was already a change.