Elias Voss, 61, has restored more than 700 antique typewriters in the 8 years since his wife Clara died. He spends most days in his sunlit clapboard workshop at the edge of Burlington, Vermont, calloused fingers prying rusted keys free, adjusting snapped springs, running test runs of short, silly harvest-themed poems he scribbles on scrap cream cardstock between jobs. Every October, he drags a scuffed folding table and three of his favorite refurbished machines to the town’s annual cider press festival, sells the typed poems for five bucks apiece, and drinks enough spiced hard cider to take the edge off the quiet loneliness that settles in his bones this time of year, when the leaves turn and the air smells like the icy storm that took Clara. The air that Saturday smells like crushed apple pulp, hickory smoke from the food truck grills, and damp earth under crumpled orange and red maple leaves. Kids scream as they chase each other through the hay bale maze, and a bluegrass band plucks a fast, twangy tune from the main stage. He’s twisting a dented 1940s Underwood key between his thumb and index finger when he sees her.
He doesn’t recognize her at first, not until she’s 10 feet away, waving, a half-empty cup of cider sloshing slightly in her other hand. It’s Lila, Clara’s youngest cousin, the one who’d shown up to the funeral in a ripped Nirvana tee and black combat boots, sobbing so hard she could barely get through her eulogy. The last time he saw her she was 20, fresh out of community college, talking about moving to Alaska to take photos of glaciers. Now she’s 48, sun-streaked auburn hair pulled back in a loose braid, a scuffed leather jacket slung over one arm, hiking boots caked with mud from the foliage trails on the edge of town. She leans against the edge of his table when she reaches him, the cuff of her plaid flannel shirt brushing his bare forearm, and he flinches like he’s been burned. He hasn’t felt a casual, intentional touch from anyone who isn’t a client handing over a check in almost a decade.
She orders a poem about apple picking, laughs when he fumbles the typewriter carriage and smudges black ink on the edge of the cardstock. Her voice is lower than he remembers, rough around the edges from years of cold mountain air, and she holds eye contact longer than most people do, like she’s actually listening when he rambles about the Underwood he’s been restoring for a high school English teacher in Boston. When she reaches across the table to grab the finished poem, her fingers brush his, and he feels a jolt go up his spine that has nothing to do with the crisp fall wind. Guilt hits him a second later, sharp and sour in the back of his throat. This is Clara’s cousin. It’s wrong. Half the people at the festival have known him and Clara since they were 20, they’d whisper behind his back at the grocery store, call him disrespectful. He should send her away, tell her it’s good to see her but he’s busy, pack up his table and go home to his empty house.
Instead, he offers her a free cup of the hard cider he’s got stashed under the table, and when the festival starts to wind down as the sun dips below the pine tree line, he lets her talk him into walking the old orchard path behind the fairgrounds. The crowd noise fades behind them, replaced by the crunch of dry leaves under their boots and the distant trill of the bluegrass fiddle from the main stage. She tells him she’s been following his typewriter restoration Instagram account for two years, that she loves the little unpolished poems he posts, that she didn’t reach out sooner because she didn’t want to overstep, didn’t want to remind him of the funeral, of the gap Clara left. She stops walking when they reach the gnarled old apple tree he and Clara carved their initials into back in 1992, turns to face him, and he can see flecks of gold in her green eyes when the last of the pink and orange sunset hits them.
She admits she had a stupid, teenage crush on him when she was 17, that she’d drive two hours to their house every summer just to hang out in his workshop and watch him fix typewriters, that she thought he was the coolest person she’d ever met. He opens his mouth to say it’s wrong, that he still loves Clara, that he’d be betraying her if he so much as kissed her, but she reaches up first, brushes her thumb across the faint scar across his left eyebrow, the one he got in the car crash that killed Clara. Her palm is warm against his skin, and he doesn’t pull away. “Clara told me once, a year before the crash, that if anything ever happened to her, she wanted you to stop moping and find someone who makes you laugh,” she says, soft enough that only he can hear it. “She’d kick your ass if she saw how you’ve been hiding out in that workshop all alone.”
He kisses her then, slow, the taste of spiced cider and cinnamon gum on her lips, the rough bark of the apple tree pressing into his back. He still feels a flicker of guilt, but it’s drowned out by the rush of something he hasn’t felt in 8 years, something warm and alive that makes his chest feel tight in the best way. It’s not a replacement for Clara, not even close. It’s just something new, something he didn’t think he deserved to have ever again.
They drive back to his workshop in his beat-up 2008 Ford F-150, her hand resting on the center console a half inch from his, and he shows her the 1952 Royal Quiet De Luxe he’s been restoring for a client, the one that used to belong to a 1950s romance novelist from rural Vermont. She sits down on the stool next to his workbench, types a line of Mary Oliver poetry on the test sheet of cardstock, her shoulder pressed firm against his. He doesn’t worry about what the neighbors will say, doesn’t worry about whether he’s earned this, for the first time in almost a decade. When she hits the carriage return, the sharp, satisfying ding echoes off the workshop walls, and he smiles for the first time in longer than he can remember.
