Ronan O’Malley is 59, makes his living restoring antique typewriters out of a cinder block garage turned shop in downtown Marshall, North Carolina, and has not voluntarily shared a meal with another person outside of family holidays in 12 years. He’s stubborn to a fault, still holds a grudge against the county commissioner who nixed his first historic depot preservation grant back in 2018, and avoids the local dive bar’s busier nights unless the bluegrass trio is playing. Thursdays are non-negotiable, even when the lot is packed and he has to park three blocks away in the rain.
The Tin Lizard smells like fried pickles and stale cigarette smoke the second he pushes through the door, and he wedges his way to his usual spot at the far end of the bar, nods at the bartender who already has his neat bourbon poured before he sits. Ten minutes later, the crowd shifts, and a woman squeezes into the empty spot next to him, her work boot scuffing his jeans as she leans in to yell her order over the fiddle. She’s the one who bought the old farmhouse a mile up the road from his cabin, the one he’s seen hauling armfuls of clay from her pickup to her backyard studio at 7 a.m. on his way to the shop, the one he’s deliberately not spoken to for three weeks because he doesn’t need the town gossips spinning stories about him dating again.
Her elbow brushes his forearm when she grabs her pilsner off the bar, and he catches a whiff of lavender hand soap and pine, like she’d been hiking before she came in. There’s a smudge of charcoal along her jawline, and when she catches him staring, she smirks, dabs at the wrong side of her face with the back of her hand. “You gonna tell me where it is, or just keep staring?” she says, loud enough for only him to hear, and he snorts, hands her the crumpled napkin he had tucked under his beer glass. Their fingers brush when she takes it, calloused, warm, and he looks away fast, stares at the bourbon swirling in his glass like it holds all the answers.
They talk for an hour, first about the bluegrass band’s terrible new fiddle player, then about the town council meeting earlier that night, the one where the commissioner tried to ram through the depot demolition vote. He’s shocked when she says she testified against it, brought photos of her grandfather working at the depot back in the 70s, swayed three swing votes to kill the measure indefinitely. He’d been so stressed before the meeting he’d forgotten to eat lunch, had left as soon as the vote passed without sticking around to see who’d helped. She teases him for bailing early, says she recognized his face from the flyers he’d taped up all over town, had been meaning to stop by his shop to drop off a set of typewriters she found at an estate sale last month.
The rain picks up as the band wraps up their set, and she curses under her breath when she looks out the window, says she walked the two miles from her farm, didn’t think the forecast was actually going to hold. He offers her a ride before he can talk himself out of it, ignores the little voice in his head that says this is how you get attached, how you get hurt again. His old Ford F150 smells like pine air freshener and typewriter ink, and he leans across her to grab the extra rain jacket from the passenger footwell, his face inches from hers, close enough to smell the citrus of her beer and rain in her hair. She doesn’t flinch, doesn’t lean back, just brushes a fleck of black ink off his cheek that he’d smudged there earlier fixing a 1930s Underwood.
The driveway to her farm is rutted with mud, and he walks her to the porch, holds the jacket over her head to keep the rain off. She fumbles with the doorknob for a second, then turns to him, rain dripping off her baseball cap brim. “You wanna come in?” she says, nods toward the stack of boxes by the door. “Those typewriters are in there. I could use a second opinion on if they’re even worth fixing.”
He follows her inside, the air warm, smelling like wet clay and cinnamon candles. She flicks on a table lamp by the couch, drags one of the boxes over, pulls out a 1952 Royal Quiet De Luxe, its metal casing shiny, no dents, keys still capped with original ivory. He runs his thumb over the worn “E” key, says it’s one of the best models they ever made, worth twice what she probably paid. She leans against the coffee table next to him, her shoulder pressed firm to his, says she didn’t care what they were worth, just wanted an excuse to talk to him that didn’t involve waving from opposite sides of the hiking trail.
He sets the typewriter’s carriage return with a soft, familiar click, and turns his face toward hers.
