Raynard Hogue, 62, made his living restoring vintage typewriters for collectors and small press poets, a trade he’d picked up after taking early retirement from his auto factory line job when his wife got sick. His biggest flaw, the one his best friend Moe nagged him about weekly, was that he’d walled himself off from any casual connection for eight years, ever since the funeral, convinced any softness toward another person was a betrayal of the 32 years he’d had with Karen. He’d dragged himself to their small Ohio town’s first post-lockdown block party only because Moe swore the pulled pork smoker had been running since 4 a.m., and the beer garden wasn’t crowded enough to trigger the agoraphobia he’d developed during the quiet years alone.
He scuffed the toe of his oil-stained work boots against the patchy grass in the beer line, ink still crusted under his fingernails from fixing a 1952 Royal KMM for a college student that morning, hoodie pulled low against the last of the September sun. When he got to the front of the line, he didn’t look up at first, just mumbled an order for a lager, and the woman behind the folding table laughed, low and warm, and said his name like she’d been expecting him.
He lifted his head and froze. It was Lila, Karen’s first cousin, the one who’d showed up to the funeral with a Tupperware of Karen’s favorite chocolate chip cookies, the ones she’d baked from Karen’s handwritten recipe the week before she died. He hadn’t seen her since that day, when she’d hugged him so tight his ribs ached and said she’d check in, only to move upstate to run a cider press a month later. Now she had thin silver streaks running through her dark auburn hair, a smudge of fermented apple pulp on her left cheek, flannel sleeves rolled up to her elbows to show a tiny apple blossom tattoo wrapped around her wrist. She was wearing work boots too, scuffed worse than his, and when she leaned across the table to hand him the pint he’d ordered, her fingers brushed his, calloused from harvesting apples, and a jolt shot up his arm that had nothing to do with the crisp fall air.
He fumbled the pint, a splash of amber liquid spilling onto the front of his faded Ohio State hoodie, and she leaned further over the table, dabbing at the wet spot with a crumpled paper napkin before he could protest. Her face was six inches from his, close enough that he could smell lavender hand cream mixed with the sharp, sweet tang of hard cider on her clothes, and a strand of her hair brushed his jaw for half a second before she pulled back. He flushed, stammering that he didn’t even like cider, and she grinned, the corners of her eyes crinkling exactly the way Karen’s did when she was teasing him. She said she remembered, that Karen used to force him to drink spiced cider every Christmas, that he’d always pretend to hate it then sneak a second mug when he thought no one was looking.
He stood there for three full minutes, half hidden by the beer tent’s canvas side, talking to her while the line behind him grew longer and people called out jokes about holding up the booze. The whole time, a war waged in his head: half of him was disgusted that he was even noticing how her smile made his chest feel light, that he was leaning in closer when she talked like he was a teenager with a crush, that the brush of her fingers had made his skin tingle. She was family, for Christ’s sake, and he was still Karen’s husband, wasn’t he? The other half of him, the part that had been quiet for eight years, was screaming that it was okay, that Karen would have never wanted him to be alone this long, that Lila was the only person who still told stories about Karen that he hadn’t heard a hundred times.
He set his half-empty pint on the table, wiped his palm on the side of his jeans, and took her hand. She pulled him around the edge of the table, into the patch of open grass where a handful of other couples were dancing, and her free hand settled on his shoulder while his rested light on her waist. They swayed off-beat, yelling the lyrics at each other over the noise of the crowd, and when the song ended, she didn’t let go of his hand. She said she had a cooler of her best small-batch cider in the back of her pickup, and her grandma’s old Underwood typewriter that she used for cider labels was in the passenger seat, broken, if he wanted to come back to her place to take a look at it that night, no pressure.
He nodded, tucking his free hand into the pocket of his hoodie, where the crumpled napkin she’d used to wipe his shirt was still folded, still carrying the faint smell of lavender and apple. He didn’t look back at Moe, who he could see hooting and waving from the picnic table across the lot, just followed Lila across the grass, her boots clicking on the asphalt path leading to the parking lot. When she opened the passenger door of her beat-up Ford truck, the smell of old paper and ripe apple hit him first, and he climbed in without a second thought.
