Rafe Beaumont is 61, makes his living restoring antique typewriters out of a cinder block shop behind his house in rural southern Wisconsin, and has not willingly attended a community event since his wife Ellie died eight years prior. His only real flaw is that he will lie through his teeth to get out of any social obligation that doesn’t involve a soldering iron, a jar of machine oil, or a stack of worn replacement typebars. This time, though, his baby sister had shown up at his door with a Tupperware of dill potato salad and a threat to hide all his size 13 work boots if he skipped the annual summer beer garden potluck, so he’d stuffed a faded Brewers cap on his head and trudged the three blocks to the town park.
The air was thick with charcoal smoke, bratwurst grease, and the thin, reedy sound of a local cover band fumbling through Tom Petty’s *Free Fallin’*, so he grabbed a sticky plastic cup of cheap lager and planted himself at the farthest picnic table from the stage, half hidden behind a gnarled oak tree, the table’s surface crisscrossed with decades of kids’ carved initials. He’d only been there 10 minutes when he spotted Lena Marquez, the woman who’d bought the old general store building downtown to turn into a used bookstore three months prior. He’d only spoken to her twice, both times when she’d dropped off misdelivered packages for him at the post office, and he’d spent every night since overthinking those 30-second interactions, alternating between kicking himself for not asking her out and feeling a sharp, unwanted guilt for even wanting to. It didn’t help that she was the ex-wife of the town’s new sheriff, a loud, arrogant blowhard who’d spent the last two months writing $150 tickets to teens for skateboarding on the sidewalk and ticketing any pickup truck with a tailgate down within city limits. Everyone in town knew messing with anything tied to the sheriff was a bad idea, and Rafe had spent his whole life avoiding unnecessary drama.
She spotted him before he could duck behind the oak, waved, and walked over, a dented metal typewriter case slung over one shoulder. The legs of her cutoff jeans brushed his knee as she slid onto the bench right next to him, no awkward six inches of space between them, and he could smell lavender lotion mixed with the faint, sweet tang of the strawberry lemonade she was holding in her other hand. “I found a 1952 Royal Quiet De Luxe at a garage sale this morning,” she said, setting the case on the table between them, her elbow brushing his oil-stained bicep when she flipped the latches open. “The shift key is stuck. The old lady selling it said you’re the only person within 30 miles who knows how to fix those without breaking them.”
He leaned in to look at the typewriter, his shoulder pressing solidly against hers, and plucked the stuck key with the tip of his pocket knife, wiggling it until it clicked back into place. The whole time he could feel the heat of her leg through his worn denim, hear the soft huff of her laugh when he joked that the sheriff would probably write him a ticket for unapproved small appliance repair in a public park. She leaned in closer, her mouth almost touching his ear, and whispered that the sheriff had called her bookstore a “waste of valuable commercial space” just last week, when he’d come in demanding she take down the pro-union posters in her front window. He laughed, louder than he meant to, and their fingers brushed when he passed the typewriter back to her, her skin soft and warm against his calloused, grease-streaked hands.
They’d been talking for 20 minutes when the sheriff stormed over, his uniform shirt unbuttoned at the collar, a scowl fixed on his red face. “Lena,” he said, his voice sharp enough to cut through the band’s music, “I thought I told you to stop fraternizing with the town deadbeats.” Rafe tensed, ready to stand up and tell the guy to go to hell, but before he could, Lena laced her fingers through his, squeezing his hand tight, and stared the sheriff dead in the eye. “I’m right where I want to be,” she said, her voice steady, no hesitation. The sheriff’s face turned a brighter shade of crimson, he spat a curse under his breath, and turned to walk away, shouldering past a group of teens carrying plates of sticky pink cotton candy.
Rafe didn’t pull his hand away. He sat there for another hour, talking to her about typewriters, about the beat-up poetry collections she sold for a dollar each by the front door of her shop, about the way Ellie had loved old Mary Oliver poems and typed him love notes on a beat-up 1960s Smith Corona every year for their anniversary. The sharp, burning guilt he’d carried for eight years didn’t feel sharp anymore, just soft, like a memory he could hold gently instead of shoving in a cardboard box in his attic.
When the sun dipped below the treeline and the band packed up their gear, they walked back to his shop together, her hand still in his, crickets chirping loud in the uncut grass along the sidewalk. He flipped on the shop’s fluorescent lights, and she ran a single, slow finger over the keys of the restored Smith Corona he kept on his front counter, the one he’d fixed for Ellie three months before she got sick. He set the Royal he’d fixed for her on the counter next to it, and poured her a glass of the sweet iced tea he kept cold in a mini fridge by the workbench.
