Javier Ruiz, 54, has restored vintage pinball machines out of his converted West Asheville garage shop for seven years, and he’s built a reputation as equal parts genius and gruff. He still holds a grudge from his 2015 divorce, when his ex left him for a Salesforce project manager 10 years younger who collected crypto and thought pinball was “a boomer waste of time,” so he keeps interactions with customers short, skips post-game-night drinks at the dive bar down the block, and still sleeps on the same lumpy twin mattress he bought the day he moved out of their shared house.
The last week of August, his monthly free game night is winding down, the air thick with the smell of old solder, lemon Pledge, and the faint skunky tang of leftover cheap beer someone left on a 1981 Pac-Man cabinet. Most of the regulars have headed out, and Javier is wiping down the glass on a mint-condition 1978 Space Invaders machine when the bell above the front door jingles. He doesn’t look up at first, assumes it’s some college kid coming back for a forgotten hoodie, until a woman’s voice, low and warm, says, “You Javier? I’m Clara Bennett from the county school board.”
He freezes, straightens up, crosses his arms over his faded Black Sabbath work shirt. He’d gotten a form letter from the board three days prior, rejecting his offer to donate three fully restored machines to the local middle school’s after-school rec program, citing “concerns over inappropriate content and gambling-adjacent activities” that had been all over the local Facebook groups for weeks. He’d been ready to tell her to get the hell out, until he gets a good look at her. She’s in crumpled linen slacks, a faded 1997 Fleetwood Mac tour tee, scuffed white New Balances, dark brown hair streaked with gray pulled back in a messy bun, a thin scar slicing across her left eyebrow. She’s holding a stack of neon pink flyers, and she holds her hands up like she’s trying to calm a spooked dog. “Before you yell, I’m the one who voted against the ban. I’m the only one who fought to take your machines. The rest of the board voted me down.”
He blinks, uncrosses his arms, nods at the beat-up bar stool by the counter. She sits, leans forward to set the flyers down, and her elbow brushes his bicep for half a second. He catches a whiff of jasmine hand lotion and spearmint gum, and his chest tightens, a feeling he hasn’t had since before the divorce. He grabs a cold black cherry seltzer from the mini fridge behind the counter, slides it across to her, and their fingers brush when she takes it. Her nails are chipped with dark purple polish, calloused at the tips, and she says she fixes vintage bikes on the side, used to play pinball in her dad’s auto shop when she was a kid.
He’s still guarded, but he leads her over to the 1992 Addams Family machine he’d finished restoring two weeks prior, shows her how to adjust the flipper tension when it sticks. They lean in at the same time to fish a stuck ball out of the machine’s side chute, and their knees bump hard under the wooden ledge. She laughs, a loud, unselfconscious cackle, and she doesn’t pull away immediately, her shoulder pressed to his, the neon lights from the machine casting pink and blue streaks across her cheeks. She beats him two rounds in a row, pumping her fist like she’d won a world championship, and he finds himself laughing too, a sound he barely recognizes coming out of his own mouth.
She explains she’s raising private funds to get the pinball machines into the rec center anyway, no public school money attached, so the board can’t say no. She asks if he’d host a fundraiser at his shop next month, cover charge at the door, free play all night, split the proceeds 50/50 so he can buy new parts for his restoration projects. He almost says no, out of habit, out of the fear of letting anyone new into the small, ordered life he’s built for himself. Then she looks up at him, her dark brown eyes crinkled at the corners, and she tucks a loose strand of hair behind her ear, and he says yes before he can talk himself out of it.
She grins, leans in for a quick, excited hug, her chest pressing against his for half a second, warm and solid, before she pulls back, flustered, apologizing for overstepping. He waves it off, hands her a stack of his shop’s business cards to pass out, and walks her to the door. The air outside is thick with late summer humidity, crickets chirping loud in the oak trees lining the street, and she waves as she gets into her beat-up 2008 Subaru Outback.
He locks the door behind her, leans his back against the cool metal, can still smell jasmine lingering in the shop’s air. He picks up one of the flyers she left on the counter, and sees her cell phone number scrawled across the bottom in messy blue ink, with a note underneath: First round of seltzer at the dive down the block is on me tomorrow, if you’re not busy. He pulls his beat-up flip phone out of his work pants pocket, types the number in, pauses for three full seconds, then hits send on the text he’s typed: I’ll bring the extra Space Invaders tokens.
