Manny Ruiz, 53, makes his living restoring vintage pinball machines out of the two-car garage behind his east Austin bungalow, and he’s held the same unnegotiable rule for 12 years, ever since his divorce: no interactions with anyone connected to his ex-wife, no exceptions. He shows up to the neighborhood block party only because his 19-year-old niece begs him, says she needs someone to man her lemonade stand for 10 minutes while she runs to the bathroom. He’s wearing the same gray flannel he wore all afternoon fixing a 1978 Space Invaders cabinet, sleeves rolled to his elbows, grease crusted under his fingernails, a half-empty can of Modelo in his free hand. He’s already mapping his exit route when someone slams into his side hard enough to slosh beer down his wrist.
It’s elote crema that hits his chest first, thick, sour, dotted with cotija cheese. He blinks down at the mess, then up at the woman who bumped him, and his throat goes tight. He recognizes her immediately: Lila, his ex’s younger cousin, the one who’d laughed so hard at his terrible wedding toast joke about pinball being the only sport that rewards both skill and stubbornness that she’d snort-laughed champagne out her nose. She’s 48 now, curls streaked with silver pulled back in a bright red bandana, overalls splattered with potting soil, a paper plate of half-eaten corn in one hand. She doesn’t even flinch when she realizes who he is, just grabs a crumpled napkin from her pocket and leans in, close enough that he can smell coconut sunscreen and the faint tang of lime on her breath.
Her forearm brushes his bicep as she dabs at the crema on his flannel, her fingers warm even through the thin fabric. He pulls back automatically, every alarm in his head blaring that this is exactly the kind of situation he’s spent over a decade avoiding. He mumbles something about it being fine, he can wash it out, starts to step away, but she catches his wrist, her fingers calloused at the tips from repotting succulents, he notices. “Wait,” she says, and she’s not smiling anymore, her dark eyes steady, no trace of awkwardness. “I’ve been meaning to track you down. I picked up a beat-up 1981 Centipede pinball cabinet at a garage sale last month, and I can’t get the flippers to work. Everyone says you’re the only guy in the city who knows how to fix stuff that old.”
The internal fight hits him fast, sharp: the familiar churn of disgust at letting anyone tied to his old life get close, warring with the low hum of attraction he can’t shake, the way she holds his gaze like she’s not scared off by his reputation as a grumpy shut-in. He opens his mouth to say he’s booked solid for three months, but she beats him to it. “I asked your ex about it first,” she says, and he flinches. “She said you’d probably make up an excuse to turn me down, but that you’re too much of a softie to let a classic cabinet rot in my garage. She also said the grudge you’re holding is against her, not me, and you know better than to take it out on people who didn’t do anything to you.”
He stares at her for a long minute, the noise of the block party fading to a hum around them: the accordion from the Tejano band playing at the end of the street, kids screaming as they chase each other with water guns, the crackle of the taco truck’s fryer. He’s spent 12 years convincing himself everyone who knew his ex would take her side, that talking to anyone connected to her was a betrayal of the anger he’d clung to like a security blanket. Standing there, with her fingers still loose around his wrist, he realizes how stupid that is, how much of his own life he’s locked away just to hold onto a grudge that doesn’t matter to anyone but him.
He nods, and a grin spreads across her face, the same snort-laugh adjacent crinkle around her eyes he remembered from the wedding. They sit down on the curb a few feet away from the lemonade stand, sharing the rest of her elote, their knees pressed together tight because the curb is narrow. She tells him about the small plant shop she runs out of the house two doors down from his, the one he’d walked past a dozen times but never bothered to enter. He tells her about the pinball restore he just finished for a San Antonio retirement home, how residents lined up to play for three hours straight when he dropped it off. She brushes crumbs of cotija off his knee at one point, her hand lingering a beat too long, and he doesn’t pull away.
He pulls a crumpled business card from his flannel pocket as the sun dips below the rooflines, scribbles his personal cell on the back, grease under his nails smudging the ink a little. “I can come by tomorrow around 10,” he says. “Bring my tools, take a look at the Centipede. If it’s just the flippers, I can fix it in an hour.” She tucks the card into her overalls pocket, leans in quick to press a soft kiss to his cheek, her lip gloss leaving a faint pink stain he can feel long after she pulls away. “I’ll make coffee,” she says, before turning to join her friends by the taco truck.
Manny stays at the block party another two hours, long after his niece packs up her lemonade stand to head home. He even dances a little to the old Ramon Ayala cover the band plays, his boots scuffing the asphalt, something he hasn’t done since before his divorce. He reaches up to touch the faint sticky spot on his cheek halfway through the song, and smiles.
