Manny Ruiz is 61, makes his living restoring antique typewriters out of the converted garage of his tiny cottage outside Silverton, Oregon, and hasn’t deviated from his 6:15am wakeup, black coffee, 8 hours of work, frozen meatloaf dinner, 9pm western movie routine in eight years. That’s how long it’s been since his wife Elara, an 11th grade English teacher who wrote flash fiction every Sunday on her beat-up 1958 Royal Quiet De Luxe, dropped dead of an undiagnosed heart condition mid-sentence at the dinner table. He built the repair business to hold onto the part of her that loved the clack of metal keys against paper, but shut everyone else out in the process: no customers linger in his shop, no small talk stretches past 90 seconds, no unplanned stops ever make it onto his calendar. He only agreed to set up a booth at the annual Maple Street Summer Fair because his old next door neighbor, who brought him split pea soup every night for a month after Elara died, asked him to, and he couldn’t say no.
It’s 92 degrees by mid-afternoon, the air thick with the smell of fried dough and cut grass, a local cover band cranking 70s southern rock a hundred feet down the street. He’s wiping down a restored 1960s Smith Corona when Clara Hale steps up to the booth. She’s 42, the new part-time town librarian, brought in her late mother’s Underwood No. 5 for repair three months prior, and Manny had been so gruff he’d barely made eye contact, taken the machine, told her to come back in two weeks, and shut the door in her face before she could ask any follow up questions. He’d slipped a tiny post-it note inside the typewriter’s case before she picked it up, though, scrawled “This one’s still got a lot of stories left in it” after he found a stack of her mom’s handwritten bedtime stories tucked in the case pocket. He’d forgotten all about it until now.
She’s wearing a faded cream linen button down, sleeves rolled to her elbows, a smudge of blueberry pie filling smudged on the left side of her jaw from the morning pie contest, holding a sweating plastic cup of cherry iced tea, white sneakers dusted with fairground dirt. She leans in over the folding table, elbow brushing the edge of his display, and the scent of coconut sunscreen and citrus lip balm drifts over, sharp and sweet, cutting through the smell of hot metal and ink that clings permanently to Manny’s work shirts. She says she’s here for the pale blue Smith Corona, for her 12-year-old niece who just got into writing poetry. She slides a crumpled $20 bill across the table, and their fingers brush when Manny takes it. His skin prickles. He hasn’t had physical contact softer than a hardware store cashier’s handshake in eight years. He freezes for half a second, hopes she doesn’t notice. She does, but she just smiles, nods at the Royal Quiet De Luxe tucked in the corner of the booth, the one that was Elara’s, and says that’s the exact model her mom used to write her bedtime stories when she was a kid, she hasn’t seen one in person in decades.
His throat goes tight. He never talks about Elara’s typewriter to anyone. He just nods, mumbles that it’s his wife’s. She doesn’t push, just shifts her weight, her knee pressing accidentally to his under the table, and she doesn’t move it. She says she kept the note he left in her mom’s typewriter, taped it to her fridge, made her cry when she found it. She’d thought he was just the grumpy typewriter guy who wouldn’t even let her step inside his shop. Manny flushes, stupid for being so cold to her back then. He’s been fighting a stupid, nagging pull toward her since she walked into his shop, the way she laughed when she tripped over his welcome mat, the way she talked about her mom like she was still right there with her. He’d told himself he was being ridiculous, that he was too old, that he was betraying Elara by even noticing another woman, that he didn’t have room for anyone new in his tiny, rigid life.
A group of kids chasing a golden retriever comes barrelling past the booth, one slamming into the table leg, tipping a glass jar full of multicolored typewriter ribbons over into the grass. Both of them bend down at the same time to grab them, their heads bumping gently, and she snorts a loud, unselfconscious laugh, her hand resting on his forearm for three whole seconds to steady herself. Her palm is warm and calloused from turning library book pages, and Manny doesn’t flinch, doesn’t pull away. She looks up at him, eyes bright in the golden hour sun, and says she’s been meaning to ask him for weeks: she’s making paella at her place tonight, has a whole stack of her mom’s handwritten stories she wants to type up, the Underwood’s ribbon tension is acting up again, and does he want to come over? No pressure, if he’s busy.
He hesitates, his first instinct to say no, to go home to his frozen dinner and John Wayne marathon and the three typewriters he needs to repair by Friday. Then he looks at the pie smudge on her jaw, at the way her thumb is still brushing the edge of his forearm, at Elara’s Royal sitting in the corner of the booth, and remembers Elara used to tease him nonstop for being too stuck in his ways, that he’d forget how to have fun if he didn’t loosen up every once in a while. He says yes.
