Elroy Voss is 67, a vintage typewriter repair technician running his shop out of a converted two-car garage behind his bungalow outside Boone, North Carolina. He’s spent 12 years intentionally closing himself off from any romantic connection after his wife left him for a traveling insurance salesman, convinced any new relationship would just disrupt the quiet, predictable routine he’d built for himself. He avoids social events longer than 90 minutes, hates being the subject of small town gossip, spends most weekends fixing typewriters for local high school creative writing classes for free, writes weekly letters to his granddaughter in Portland on a 1962 IBM Selectric he restored himself.
It’s late April, the fire department’s weekly fish fry, the air thick with the smell of fried catfish, hushpuppies, vinegar-based coleslaw, a four-piece bluegrass band plays off to the side of the gravel lot, folding picnic tables bolted to cracked concrete slabs. Most of the town is there, folks lingering over crumpled paper plates at their feet, swapping stories about winter storm damage and the upcoming ramp festival.
Elroy is halfway through his second catfish fillet, avoiding the small talk of the retired teachers next to him, when Marnie Hale drops her plate of food across from him, her scuffed work boots kicking a crumpled napkin across the concrete. She’s 59, moved back to town three months prior to take over the public library after her dad, Elroy’s old fishing buddy, passed last winter. He hasn’t talked to her more than five minutes at the funeral, didn’t expect her to seek him out. She sits down hard enough that the wobbly bench jolts, her left knee brushing the side of his faded denim jeans. She doesn’t shift away.
He can smell lavender hand cream and lemon Pledge on her, she’d been polishing the library’s 1970s oak card catalog that morning, she says, wiping a strand of silver-streaked dark hair out of her face when she tells him. She leans in when he mentions he fixed her dad’s old Royal Quiet De Luxe back in 2018, her forearm brushing his when she passes him the jar of Texas Pete hot sauce he’d been reaching for. Her nails are chipped navy blue, a tiny scar runs along the side of her index finger, she got it when she was 16, crashing her dad’s fishing boat into a dock piling, she laughs when he asks about it.
He finds himself leaning in too, forgetting to look away when she talks, forgetting the couple at the next table are already side-eyeing them, forgetting he’d planned to leave 20 minutes prior to catch the recorded Braves game. Half of him is screaming that this is a mistake, that he’s too set in his ways to let anyone new disrupt his routine, that the town gossips will be talking about this for weeks. The other half of him can’t stop smiling at the way she snorts when he tells the story about the time her dad dropped a typewriter off the back of his fishing boat trying to carry it and a cooler of beer at the same time.
She tells him she found that same Royal in the back of her dad’s attic, it’s been sitting on the counter at the library right now, half the keys are stuck, she doesn’t trust anyone else in town knows how to fix it, asks him to come take a look at it after the fish fry wraps up. There’s also a box of old Robert Frost collections her dad left that she knows he likes, she saved them just for him. He hesitates for three full beats, his first instinct to say no, go home, feed his old hound dog, watch the game he’d been looking forward to all week, but he finds himself nodding before he can stop himself, feels heat creep up his neck, something he hasn’t felt since he was a teenager asking a girl to prom.
They dump their crumpled plates in the trash by the fry station, walk to her beat-up 2008 Ford F150, gravel crunching under their work boots, the sun dipping low over the Blue Ridge peaks, painting the sky pink and tangerine, crickets starting to chirp in the grass at the edge of the lot. She stops at the passenger door, reaches up without warning, brushes a crumb of hushpuppy off the edge of his jaw, her fingers soft, calloused a little at the tips from turning thousands of book pages over the years.
He follows her truck to the library, the streetlights flicking on one by one as they drive the three blocks downtown, the small brick building wrapped in a porch lined with bright pink azaleas in full bloom. She unlocks the front door, holds it open for him, the smell of old paper and leather bindings hits him right before she steps inside ahead of him, her shoulder brushing his chest as she passes under his line of sight to the beat-up Royal typewriter sitting on the front desk, its dust cover half off, keys glinting in the warm overhead light.
