Rafi Ortega, 53, spends 90 percent of his waking hours hunched over a workbench in his garage, prying jammed typewriter keys free, rethreading frayed ribbons, sanding rust off 1950s Royal chassis for clients across the country. He hasn’t attended a group gathering larger than a trip to the grocery store since 2020, when his older sister spent 17 days on a ventilator with COVID and he spent those weeks camped in the hospital parking lot, too scared to leave and too scared to go in. The only reason he’s at the annual Westside Block Party on an 82-degree July Saturday is his 16-year-old niece, Lila, who’s selling pork tamales smelling of chili and lime out of a dented tin roaster to fund her travel soccer team’s trip to the state tournament. He’s hovering three feet back from her folding table, half-empty Pacifico sweating in his hand, turning down every offered handshake and hug with a tight, polite smile and a mumbled excuse about a cold he swears he’s getting over.
He’s reaching for a tamale to slip into a paper bag for a regular client who lives three houses down when her hand brushes his. He flinches so hard he almost knocks the roaster off the table, then freezes. She doesn’t pull away immediately, her thumb grazing the thin, silvery scar on his left knuckle he got last winter when a rusted Underwood spring snapped back and sliced him open. He looks up, and it’s Marnie, the woman who moved into the house two doors down last March, the one he’s waved at over the fence every morning when he’s carrying out the trash, the one who leaves potted basil on his porch step sometimes with no note. She’s wearing a faded cream linen button down unbuttoned one notch too low, cutoff jean shorts, scuffed white sneakers caked with potting soil, and she smells like cedar mulch and peppermint lip balm. “Sorry,” she says, grinning, and her voice is lower than he expected, rough around the edges like she smokes one cigarette a day after closing her plant shop downtown. “Didn’t mean to startle you. These tamales smell too good to be patient, I guess.”
The rational part of his brain is screaming to step back, to go wash his hands in the portable sink by the grill, to retreat to his garage and spend the rest of the night cleaning typewriter parts and listening to old Johnny Cash records. But the other part of him, the part he’s ignored for three years, is buzzing, replaying the brush of her thumb against his scar, the way her eyes didn’t dart away when he looked at her. He mumbles an apology for flinching, explains the scar, and she holds up her left wrist, showing him a matching thin, silvery scar right above her pulse point. “Rose thorn,” she says, wiggling her wrist. “Tried to plant a climbing rose along my back fence last month. Fought me the whole time. Bled all over my favorite work gloves.” He laughs, a real one, the kind he hasn’t let out in months, and she nods toward the end of the block, where a small dirt trail leads down to the creek that cuts through the neighborhood. “You wanna get away from all the noise?” she asks. “I won’t make you talk to anyone. I hate small talk too.”
He hesitates for three full seconds, then nods. They walk down the trail side by side, the long, dewy grass brushing his bare calves, the distant sound of the party’s country radio station fading behind the gurgle of the creek and the chirp of crickets already waking up as the sun dips low. She sits on a half-rotted log half-submerged in the shallow water, pats the spot next to her, and he sits, leaving exactly two inches of space between their shoulders. A neon green dragonfly zips past her face ten minutes later, and she leans into him automatically to dodge it, her bare arm pressing full length against his. He doesn’t flinch. He can feel the warmth of her skin through the thin cotton of his t-shirt, the faint rough texture of the calluses on her forearm from hauling 5-gallon potted plants around all day. She doesn’t lean back, even after the dragonfly is gone.
They talk for 40 minutes, no small talk, no awkward pauses. He tells her about the 1920s Remington he’s restoring for a retired English professor in Maine, the way the keys stick just right when you type fast enough, the way the ink smells like old books and regret. She tells him about her husband, who died of COVID in 2021, the way she still flinches when someone coughs too loud in the grocery store, the way she bought the plant shop because it was the only place she felt calm after he passed. The sun dips below the treeline, turning the sky streaky pink and tangerine, and she turns to face him, her hazel eyes flecked with gold, not looking away, not leaning in, just waiting. He lifts his hand slow, so she can pull back if she wants, and brushes a stray strand of auburn hair off her forehead. Her skin is warm, a little damp from the summer heat, and she leans into his touch just barely, her eyelashes fluttering for half a second.
When they walk back up the trail toward the party, she slips her hand into his, her calloused fingers fitting perfectly between his, the scar on her wrist lining up exactly with the scar on his knuckle when their fingers lace together. He doesn’t think about germs, doesn’t think about the three years he spent locked in his garage alone, doesn’t think about the stack of typewriter repairs waiting for him on his workbench. He squeezes her hand once, and when she squeezes back, he knows he’s not going home alone tonight.
