The van fails in front of our building at twelve-seventeen, though later we disagree about whether the sound is a belt or a hose or nothing mechanical at all. What we agree on is the woman getting out. She opens the hood, closes it, opens the rear doors, and looks past three white boxes up at our windows.

It is the hottest Sunday that summer. We have been saying this since Thursday, and by noon Sunday it is finally true.

The woman rings 1A because 1A has the only bell that works. She asks if the building has a walk-in refrigerator. We laugh, although she has not made a joke. Then she asks about freezers.

The boxes contain the three tiers of a wedding cake. They are traveling separately and will be put together at the hotel. The bottom box is so wide she carries it with both arms straight. The top one could hold a hat. The middle box is the problem, though we do not know that yet.

She tells us her name is Lena. She says another refrigerated van is coming from across town. The dispatcher says eighty minutes. She says the cake is buttercream, no custard, no cream cheese, but it has to stay firm. She says keep the boxes level, closed, and cold. She says condensation as if it is a guest who has already been invited.

We begin with the confidence of people offering space they have not measured.

In 1A, the bottom tier meets six bags of dumplings, two chickens bought when they were ninety-nine cents a pound, and a soup container that has been frozen so long the masking tape says only MAYBE LENTIL. Mr. Nowak takes out the freezer drawer. The box slides in with less than an inch to spare. He puts the dumplings and chickens in the sink. We say we will cook them.

He says, “You will?”

We mean the building. At that moment the distinction seems rude.

The top tier goes to 3B. Leila’s freezer contains breast-milk bags arranged upright by date inside two plastic bins. Nobody touches those. She moves them into an insulated cooler with the frozen packs she uses for the clinic. The top box takes the upper shelf. A colony of fruit ice pops comes out and begins, at once, to surrender its shape.

The middle tier is carried up and down the stairs twice. In 2C it is too tall. In 4A it is too wide. In 3A the freezer door would close if the box were turned on its side, which Lena refuses before we finish suggesting it.

“Level,” she says.

We repeat level to one another for the next hour, sometimes when we mean something else.

The middle box waits on the tile inside our front door while we open every freezer in the building. Cold pours out around our ankles. We discover how little empty space can be owned in common.

Mrs. Alvarez has trays of beans in the freezer door and a whole fish lying diagonally across the bottom. The fish is silver under two grocery bags. Her grandson calls it the expensive fish. Mrs. Alvarez says nobody asked him.

The Kims have meat cut thin and stacked in flat parcels. They say it is for later. All frozen food is for later, but we understand this answer as a refusal and, because we are generous, do not say so.

In 4B there is a gallon tub of vanilla ice cream with one spoonful missing, three loaves of bread, and nothing else. We decide bread can come out. Then we measure the middle box and find the shelf is half an inch too narrow even without it.

Lena kneels beside the box and looks at her phone. Sixty-eight minutes, the dispatcher now says. She has put frozen gel packs around the cake inside the cardboard, but every time the front door opens, hot light reaches across the tile.

“We can cut it,” someone says.

Lena puts one palm flat on the lid.

We did not mean the cake, we explain. We meant the box. This is also unacceptable.

The wedding is at a hotel eleven miles away. We do not know the couple’s names. Their names are on the invoice inside Lena’s cab, but nobody asks to see it. This makes it easier for us to discuss what strangers deserve.

We take the food from 1A first because it is already sweating.

The chickens are still rigid. The dumplings knock together in their bags. We cook what we have taken out while it is still icy, before the heat can make the decision for us.

Two chickens fit into Mr. Nowak’s oven if one pan goes lengthwise and the other sideways. He has paprika but no lemons. The Kims have lemons. This is how the first trade begins, though they have not offered their meat.

The dumplings go into three pans. One bag splits on the counter and rolls its contents under the toaster, behind the dish rack, and once, spectacularly, into the hallway. We recover all but one. We say all but one because no one wants to move the refrigerator.

The middle tier does not fit anywhere. We know this more thoroughly now.

On the second landing, the fruit ice pops bleed red and purple into their wrappers. Children hold them over the sink and call this helping. They are correct. A pot of water goes on for the beans from Mrs. Alvarez’s freezer door. She has not agreed to the fish.

We agree that the fish would cook quickly.

Mrs. Alvarez says, “Who is we?”

The question does not improve us, but it slows us down.

The cake remains on the front tile. Lena has moved a floor fan away from it because warm air is still warm air even when it travels faster. Her shirt is dark between the shoulder blades. She takes calls from the bakery, the dispatcher, and someone at the hotel who keeps asking whether the flowers are safe. Lena says the flowers are not the issue. Then she apologizes, though we think she should not.

At twelve-forty-nine, 2C produces a tape measure. At twelve-fifty-two, 3A produces a screwdriver. We remove shelves from three freezers and doors from none. The middle box defeats every arrangement.

Its dimensions have become an insult. Twenty inches wide. Twenty inches deep. Fifteen inches high with the lid. We have cupboards larger than that, closets larger than that, lives conducted around objects larger than that. None of them is cold.

We begin putting the food on the long table in the Alvarez apartment because their kitchen and dining room are one room; Mrs. Alvarez has not stopped us. Packages arrive there from each floor. Not gifts. We are careful about this at first.

The Kims bring down one parcel of meat, the smallest. Mr. Kim says it was nearest the door. We say nothing about the five larger parcels behind it, which we saw. Leila carries the milk cooler into her bedroom and shuts the door. She returns with a bag of frozen spinach and half a cake from a birthday in May. The birthday cake goes into 3B’s refrigerator, where it can soften without becoming lunch.

From 4B come the loaves and the gallon of ice cream. The ice cream is soft at the edges. We put it in bowls before anyone can propose returning it to the freezer.

Mrs. Alvarez brings the fish last.

She does not offer it. She places it in the sink, cuts away the grocery bags, and tells her grandson to find the green onions. We had assumed the fish was being saved for a birthday, or for a visitor, or against a week when money failed. We had assigned it every noble purpose available to us. She says it was expensive and she wanted to eat it. No date. No guest. No lesson.

We apologize in several directions.

The food covers the table but has not yet made space. The middle tier still has nowhere to go because we have emptied portions of many freezers instead of one whole shelf in one freezer. This resembles compromise until the box is measured again.

It is the Kims who return upstairs. We do not follow. We hear their freezer open, then the knock of parcels being lifted out and set on the counter. When they come back, they are carrying all the meat in a laundry basket lined with dish towels.

“We can cook it,” we say.

“No,” Mrs. Kim says. “Some.”

We revise our agreement.

Some goes into a pan with the lemons. Some, still hard at the center, is packed close around the milk cooler without touching it. Some goes into Mr. Nowak’s freezer where the bottom cake has displaced the chickens. The private arithmetic remains private. It has merely acquired more kitchens.

At one-oh-eight, the middle tier goes into 2B, the Kims’ freezer, after the top shelf is removed. The door closes.

The sound it makes is ordinary. A rubber seal meeting its frame. We cheer anyway.

Lena writes the apartment number on the box in her phone. Then she writes 1A and 3B. She asks if we can leave the doors shut until the van comes.

We assure her that shutting doors is one of the things we do best.

For twenty-eight minutes the cake is invisible.

Waiting is harder. The emergency gave each of us a box to carry, a shelf to measure, a thing to take from somewhere cold. Waiting gives us the smell of food and the knowledge that none of it has become a meal merely because it is all in one room.

The chickens need time. The thin meat does not. The dumplings are browning too fast on one side. Mrs. Alvarez’s fish is scored, salted, and laid over green onions in a pan too small for its tail. The beans refuse urgency.

We use four apartments’ burners and communicate by shouting into the stairwell.

“Lower,” someone calls.

“The heat or the pan?”

“Yes.”

We carry spatulas upstairs and potholders down. We discover that 4A owns twelve dinner plates and no serving bowl, while 3A owns five serving bowls and two forks. The Kims’ rice cooker arrives full. Nobody remembers seeing them start it.

The children have purple hands from the ice pops. They set the table solemnly, one spoon at each place until the spoons run out. After that they use forks.

At one-thirty-six, the replacement van turns the corner. We see its white roof before Lena does and shout from four windows. For a moment we are proud in the dangerous way, as if the van has come because we arranged it.

The new driver backs into the shade beside the building. The cargo compartment is already cold. He and Lena bring in three nonslip mats and carry the boxes out one at a time: top from 3B, bottom from 1A, middle from 2B.

The cardboard is dry. The lids have stayed closed. Lena checks each one without touching the buttercream inside. On the middle box, a dark patch the size of a thumb has appeared near one corner where condensation has dampened the outer cardboard. She presses the cardboard, not the cake, and says it is fine.

We do not ask her to say it twice.

She fits the boxes against the van wall and straps each separately. The flowers, still not the issue, go in last. She thanks us one apartment at a time, using the numbers from her phone because she does not know our names.

Later we will say nobody wanted thanks. We will say Mrs. Alvarez laughed. Mr. Nowak remembers that she did not. Leila remembers Lena saying saved and Mrs. Kim correcting her to stored. The children remember only that the ice cream was melting.

What happens is smaller. Lena stands in the open van and lifts one hand. We lift several back.

The van doors close at one-forty-four. We watch the cake go to a wedding we will not see, for people whose names we still do not know. It leaves intact. The fish is still expensive, the milk packs still need replacing, and six bags of dumplings are still missing from rent week.

The hallway is warm again.

We go upstairs because the chickens are ready and the beans are nearly so. Mrs. Alvarez sets the fish in the middle of the table. The Kims bring the meat in its pan. Mr. Nowak arrives with both chickens and reminds us which one got paprika first. Leila brings the spinach and leaves the bedroom door shut.

We place the soft ice cream in the freezer compartment of the Alvarez refrigerator, where it will not harden before we eat it. We put the birthday cake beside it. It leans slightly under its plastic dome.

The food does not match. The dumplings have crisp sides and pale ones. The beans need salt. One chicken is done before the other. Mrs. Alvarez keeps the fish head. Her grandson objects and is ignored.

We sit.

This is also not true at first. Four of us sit. Two stand behind chairs. The children take the floor. Someone goes to 4A for the twelve plates, and someone else knocks on 2C because we have used their tape measure but not invited them. The woman in 2C says she was invited when we shouted through her ceiling for twenty-eight minutes. She comes down carrying pickles.

A chair arrives from the bedroom. Then a folding chair from 1A. Then the desk chair from upstairs, rolling badly over the Alvarez rug.

The table has no middle tier. It has a fish spine, chicken bones, melting bowls, and food that was intended for later arriving all at once.

We make room for one more chair.

Then another.