Manny Ruiz, 53, makes his living fixing vintage arcade cabinets out of the cinder block garage behind his ranch house in western Ohio, and he’s held the same petty grudge for 31 years. Widowed eight years prior, he spends most Friday nights at the local VFW fish fry, where he sets up half-repaired Donkey Kong and Frogger machines for the neighborhood kids for free, and nurses one Bud Light for three hours before heading home to rewatch old NASCAR races. He’s wiping fry grease off the knee of his faded Carhartt jeans when he spots her, leaning against the splintered edge of a picnic table 20 feet away, silver streak cutting through her dark shoulder-length hair, wearing a frayed 1992 Judas Priest tour shirt he’d bought for his high school girlfriend, her older sister, back when they were seniors.
His jaw tightens. Lena Hale. The reason he’d gotten suspended for three days senior year, or so he’d always thought. He’d snuck a Pac-Man cabinet into the gym after hours for the prom afterparty, and she’d ratted him out to the principal, or so the story went. He hasn’t spoken to her since she left town two weeks after graduation, and he’d never planned to. But she’s already pushing off the table and walking toward him, bare legs dusted with sawdust, scuffed white converse on her feet, a plastic cup of something amber in one hand. She stops so close he can smell coconut sunscreen and the faint burn of bourbon on her breath, and she smirks like she already knows he’s been gawking.
“Still wearing those stupid work boots with the neon laces?” she says, nodding at his feet. He’s so thrown he doesn’t think to snark back before she’s reaching for the Bud Light in his hand, their fingers brushing when she wraps her own around it. He feels the rough callus on her index finger, the ink of a tiny Pac-Man ghost tattooed on her knuckle, and he freezes. She takes a long sip, hands the cup back, and wipes her mouth on the back of her wrist. “You still think I ratted you out about that Pac-Man machine, don’t you.” It’s not a question.
She snorts, sits down on the edge of the picnic table bench, her thigh pressing against his for three slow beats before she shifts, but not far enough that the heat of her leg doesn’t seep through the thin denim of his jeans. “I covered for you, dumbass. The principal found the polaroids some freshman took of you hauling the cabinet in, taped to the inside of the yearbook office door. I told him I’d helped you haul it, so he only suspended you, not expelled you. You think if I ratted you out I’d have taken half the blame?”
He blinks. No one ever told him that. He’d been so mad he’d never asked, never let her explain, had avoided her like the plague for the last month of school before she left. He stares at her, the faint crinkles at the corners of her eyes when she smirks, the tiny scar above her left eyebrow he’d forgotten she got when they’d snuck out to go mudding senior year, before he started dating her sister. She’s a tattoo artist, she tells him, just moved back to town after her divorce, bought the little empty shop on Main Street, wants to fill it with old arcade machines for people to play while they wait for their appointments.
She leans in a little, and his chest tightens. He’s not used to anyone this close, not since his wife passed, not unless they’re handing him a broken joystick or a plate of fried catfish. He can hear the lilt of her voice over the sound of the band, the crackle of the fryer off to the side, the kids yelling as they beat each other on the Frogger machine he’d set up by the door. She reaches out, taps the faded Pac-Man patch sewn onto the breast of his work shirt, her finger brushing the fabric light as a feather. “I always wanted to play that cabinet you hauled to the gym. You wouldn’t let me touch it, said I’d break the joystick. You still have it?”
He nods before he thinks about it. It’s in the back of his garage, half disassembled, he’d been meaning to fix it for years but never got around to it. “Mostly works. Just needs a new coin door.”
She grins, and it’s the same grin she had when she’d talked him into sneaking her into a 21-and-over concert when they were 17, wild and unapologetic, and he feels that same stupid pull in his gut he’d felt back then, the one he’d pushed down for decades because she was his girlfriend’s little sister, off limits, a narc. “I’ll bring a six pack of that IPA you pretend to hate, and a coin door I picked up at a flea market last month. You gonna let me play this time?”
He smirks, downs the last of his Bud Light, crumples the cup in his hand. “Only if you don’t whine when I beat your high score.”
She laughs, and the sound cuts through the noise of the fry, warm and rough, and she stands up, brushes crumbs off her cutoffs. She gives his arm a light squeeze, her hand lingering just long enough to make his skin prickle, before she turns to walk back to her truck parked by the road. He follows her out a few minutes later, waves off the teasing hoots from the VFW guys who’ve been watching them talk all night, and pulls out of the parking lot, her beat up silver Ford truck following half a car length behind him down the back road to his house.
He pulls into his driveway, cuts the engine, gets out of his truck, and looks over to see her leaning against her driver’s side door, holding up a six pack of IPA in one hand and a dented, slightly rusted coin door in the other, grinning so wide the dimples in her cheeks show.
