Start with the building, because in Perth Amboy the building decides whether the flowers arrive. This is one of the densest square miles in New Jersey: block after block of two- and three-family houses through the Second and Fifth Wards, up Hall Avenue and Fayette Street, across the Budapest section that the city's Hungarian families named, over into Dunham Heights. Many of those houses have one doorbell for three units, and the name taped beside it belongs to whoever put the lease in their name in 1998. Downstairs apartments open straight onto the sidewalk with no stoop worth leaving a vase on. Upstairs apartments are reached by an outside stair at the side of the house that a driver will not find in the dark. So when you order a birthday bouquet here, the useful information is not the street — it is the unit, the floor, the name actually on the bell, and a working mobile number for the recipient or for whoever is home. Give those four things and a same-day birthday delivery in this city is close to routine. Withhold them and you have bought a bouquet that spends the afternoon in a van.
Finally, the texture of the occasion itself, which in Perth Amboy is unmistakably a Spanish-speaking city's texture. Roughly three in four residents are Hispanic — Dominican, Puerto Rican, Mexican, Central American, in that rough order of weight — and a great many birthday orders here are placed by an adult child in Florida, in New York, or overseas for a parent or grandparent who lives with family in the Fifth Ward or over the Fords line. Two practical consequences. First, ask for the card line in Spanish if that is the language the recipient reads; a hand-written Feliz cumpleaños, mamá lands differently than an English line the recipient has to translate. Second, the recipient is often not the householder, so name them explicitly and add the relationship, because the person who opens the door may be a grandson who has no idea who sent what. The city's celebration calendar also runs heavily through quinceañeras and Sweet Sixteens booked into halls along Convery Boulevard and the State Street side, and the Sadowski Parkway promenade on the Raritan Bay waterfront is where half the birthday photographs in this city get taken. If the party is at the waterfront or the marina rather than at a house, give the pavilion or parking area and a mobile number, and expect the driver to call on arrival rather than find a group on a mile of open promenade.