Manny Ruiz, 53, runs a one-man antique typewriter restoration shop out of his detached garage in northern Kentucky, has avoided every neighborhood block party for the past three years. He only showed up this time because his sister called that morning and threatened to drive two hours to drag him out of the house if he spent another Saturday eating frozen burritos and rewatching 90s Reds games alone. He’s wearing a faded navy work shirt crusted with black typewriter ribbon ink at the cuffs, a paper plate with a half-eaten bratwurst and pickles in one hand, a warm IPA sweating through its label in the other, and he’s already mapped his escape route to his beat-up F-150 parked three houses down.
The air smells like charred grill grates, sweet corn, and citronella candles. Kids scream as they chase each other with water guns, a classic rock cover band plays a wobbly version of “Jack and Diane” from a makeshift stage at the end of the street, and every few steps someone tries to stop him to ask about his shop, small talk he’s never had the patience for. He’s just about to turn for the truck when a woman sits down next to him on the splintered pine picnic table bench, so close their thighs are barely an inch apart, and he freezes.
He recognizes her immediately: Clara, the woman who moved into the blue ranch two doors down two months prior, the one he helped carry three boxes of library books up her front porch when her moving crew bailed on her mid-load. She’s got a paper plate with a slice of peach pie in front of her, cinnamon dusting the crust, and she smells like lavender hand lotion and ripe peaches, a sharp nice contrast to the beer and grill smoke hanging over the street. She says she’d been looking for him all night, wants to thank him properly for the help with the boxes, and he shrugs, says it was no big deal, already mentally kicking himself for not leaving five minutes earlier.
He’d sworn to himself after his divorce three years ago that he wouldn’t let anyone new in, wouldn’t waste time on small talk or dates or the messy work of getting to know someone again, had even painted a “no visitors without prior appointment” sign on his shop door to enforce it. But when she asks him about the typewriter he was carrying into his house the week before, a 1956 Underwood he’d picked up at an estate sale, he finds himself talking without thinking, telling her about the kid who’d commissioned the restoration, a 17-year-old who writes horror stories and can’t stand typing on his laptop.
She leans in when he talks, elbows on the table, and her forearm brushes his when she reaches for a napkin next to his soda can. Her skin is warm, he notices, a thin pale scar snaking around her wrist from a childhood bike crash she mentions offhand a minute later, and he has to fight the urge to run his thumb over the raised edge of it. She holds eye contact the entire time he’s talking, no glancing at her phone, no scanning the crowd for someone more interesting, hazel eyes flecked with gold crinkling at the corners when he makes a dumb joke about how typewriter ribbon stains never come out of anything, including his ex-wife’s favorite linen tablecloth.
The conflict sits hot in his chest the whole time, half of him screaming to leave, to stick to his rule, to not risk getting hurt again, the other half leaning in too, hanging on every word she says about working at the local public library, about how she’s been trying to write her own collection of short stories about growing up in Appalachia, about how she’s always wanted a vintage typewriter to write on because she thinks the clack of the keys helps her think better.
When she asks if he’d be open to her stopping by his shop sometime, maybe he could show her the basics of how to maintain a typewriter, maybe even help her pick one out that fits her budget, he hesitates for a full three seconds, every self-imposed rule bouncing around his head. Then he says yes, pulls out his beat-up iPhone to swap numbers with her, his fingers a little clumsy when he types his contact info into her phone.
She squeezes his wrist gently when she stands up to go help the local food bank volunteers pack up leftover food, says she’ll text him Monday to set up a time, and he nods, can’t think of anything to say that doesn’t sound stupid. He sits on the bench for another 10 minutes after she leaves, finishes his warm beer, eats the last bite of his bratwurst, and realizes he hasn’t thought about his ex-wife once the entire time he was talking to Clara, hasn’t felt that heavy hollow ache in his chest that’s been there for three years.
