Silas Marquez is 52, makes his living restoring antique typewriters out of the detached garage behind his Portland bungalow, and hasn’t attended a neighborhood block party since his wife Ellen died of breast cancer eight years prior. His 22-year-old daughter showed up on his porch at 2 PM that Saturday, holding a six pack of his favorite hazy IPA, and threatened to change the passcode to his Netflix account if he didn’t drag himself down the street to the event. He’d grumbled the whole way, wiping sweat off the back of his neck with the hem of his faded Mariners tee, already mentally running through the list of 1950s Royal typewriters he had lined up to repair the next week.
The block smelled like charred bratwurst, citronella candles, and chlorine from the slip n slide a group of kids were screaming down in the middle of the road. Silas grabbed a red plastic cup of beer from the volunteer stand, leaned against an oak tree, and planned to stay for exactly 45 minutes before bailing. That plan fell apart when Lila Carter bumped into him. She was his new next door neighbor, had moved into the house three months prior, worked as a travel nurse who’d just taken a permanent position at the local VA hospital. He’d only exchanged two sentences with her before, both about his overgrown rose bushes spilling over onto her property line.
Her shoulder pressed firm against his bicep when she reached past him for a container of dill potato salad on the potluck table, and the smell of coconut sunscreen and jasmine perfume wrapped around him before he could step back. She dropped a cloth napkin a second later, and when both of them reached for it at the same time, their fingers grazed. The contact was so light he would have missed it if he wasn’t already hyper aware of how close she was standing, her bare arm warm against his even through the thin fabric of his shirt. She held eye contact for a full beat longer than was polite, the corner of her mouth tugging up into a half smile, before she picked up the napkin and wiped a smudge of mustard off her cut-off jean clad thigh.
Silas felt his chest tighten, a familiar twist of guilt and shame coiling in his gut. He’d spent eight years actively avoiding any woman who showed even the faintest interest in him, convinced that dating again would be a betrayal of Ellen’s memory, that he was too old, too set in his weird typewriter-obsessed routines to bother learning how to be with someone new. He opened his mouth to mumble an excuse to leave, but then she laughed at a dumb offhand comment he made about how he could rebuild a typewriter’s carriage in 15 minutes flat but couldn’t grill a hot dog without turning it into a charcoal briquette, and the sound of it was warm and rough, like she spent half her time yelling over beeping hospital monitors.
They ended up sitting on the curb 20 feet away from the rest of the crowd, their feet dangling over the storm drain, passing Silas’s cup of beer back and forth when she mentioned she forgot to grab one for herself. She told him she’d just gotten out of an 11 year marriage to a man who’d cheated on her for half of it, that she’d moved to Portland to get as far away from her old life in Ohio as possible, that she’d stared at the old Underwood typewriter he had propped in his front window every morning on her way to work, wondering if it still worked. Silas told her about Ellen, about how she’d collected typewriters her whole life, how he’d started the repair business after she died to keep her collection from gathering dust in the attic. He didn’t realize he was telling her any of it until he finished, his throat tight, and she didn’t say a word, just brushed her knee against his, soft and deliberate, and didn’t move it away.
The sun started to dip below the rooflines, painting the sky pink and tangerine, when he found himself asking her if she wanted to come over to see the typewriter, maybe learn how to type a few words on it. He hesitated for half a second after the words left his mouth, waiting for the familiar wave of disgust at himself to hit, but it didn’t. All he felt was the low hum of excitement, the kind he hadn’t felt since he was a teenager asking a girl to prom. She nodded immediately, pushing herself off the curb, and he stood up next to her, his hand brushing the small of her back for half a second when a kid darted between them, running after a runaway beach ball.
They walked the half block to his house in silence, the sound of the party fading behind them, crickets starting to chirp in the grass. She paused on his front porch step, her hand brushing his forearm when she asked if he had any cold lemonade inside, the kind with fresh mint she’d seen him harvesting from his garden the week before. He nodded, fumbling with his house keys for a second before he got the lock open, and held the door open for her. She stepped across the threshold first, glancing over her shoulder at him with that same half smile, and he stepped inside after her, closing the door softly behind him to block out the distant noise of the party.
