Ronan O’Malley, 53, makes his living restoring antique typewriters out of the ground floor of his Portland row house, a space he hasn’t let anyone who isn’t a paying customer enter since his wife Ellen passed eight years prior. His biggest flaw, if you ask his next-door neighbor Marnie, is that he’ll lie through his teeth about having work to do to get out of any neighborhood gathering, even the annual summer block party he used to plan with Ellen. This year, Marnie cornered him on his front porch at 4 PM, beer in one hand, plate of grilled bratwurst in the other, and refused to leave until he agreed to come for at least an hour.
He’s been lingering by the taco truck for 45 minutes, half-empty Modelo sweating through the paper napkin wrapped around it, when she bumps into him. He’s mid-bite of a carnitas taco, hot sauce dribbling down his chin, when her elbow catches his bicep and her iced lavender lemonade sloshes over the rim of her mason jar, soaking the cuff of his gray flannel shirt. She grabs his forearm to steady him before he can drop his taco, her palm cool from holding the cold drink, a faint, rough callus on the pad of her index finger he recognizes from years of handling heavy, well-worn tools. She’s Lila, the wildlife photographer who rented the carriage house at the end of the block three months prior, the ex-wife of Ellen’s cousin Jake, the guy who got drunk at Ellen’s funeral and yelled at everyone for “making a big deal out of nothing.” Everyone in the neighborhood knows the unspoken rule: you don’t fraternize with Jake’s ex, not if you want to avoid the family drama that follows him everywhere.
She laughs, swiping a paper napkin from the stack on the taco truck counter to dab at the wet spot on his sleeve, and holds his eye contact for two beats longer than casual politeness requires. The setting sun hits the honey-blonde streaks in her brown hair, and he can smell jasmine shampoo and the faint, smoky tang of campfire on her shirt, like she just got back from a trip out to the Gorge that morning. He knows he should mumble an excuse and walk away, go back to his shop and tinker with the 1940s Underwood he’s been picking at for weeks, but he stays. They talk for an hour, leaning against the side of the taco truck while the 90s cover band down the block fumbles through a Matchbox Twenty cover, kids screaming as they run through the street with water guns, the sweet smell of grilled corn drifting over from the food stand at the end of the block. She mentions she has her grandmother’s 1950s Royal Quiet De Luxe sitting in her closet, broken, that she’s been meaning to get fixed for years but never found anyone she trusted to work on it. He offers to come look at it after the party dies down, no charge, before he can think better of it. She smirks, like she knows exactly how much he’s overstepping the unspoken neighborhood line, and nods.
He finishes fixing it ten minutes later, types out the first line of the Mary Oliver poem Ellen used to read to him on their camping trips, before he types his personal cell number on the line below it, no work number, no shop hours, just the digits he only gives to three people total. He slides the paper across the table to her, and she laughs, quiet, like she knew he was going to do it before he did. She tells him Jake hasn’t talked to her in two years, that no one in the family even likes him enough to mention who she’s seeing, that she’s been waving at him from her porch for three months waiting for him to stop hiding in his shop. He walks back to his house at 11, the mason jar of leftover lavender lemonade she pressed on him cold in his hand, the air cool enough that he pulls his flannel tighter around his shoulders. He doesn’t feel guilty, for the first time in eight years he doesn’t feel like he’s waiting for something bad to happen, just light, like the weight he’s been carrying around in his chest since the day Ellen died got a little lighter.
He unlocks his shop door, sets the half-empty lemonade on the workbench next to the half-restored Underwood he’d been picking at for weeks, and smiles before he turns on the overhead light.
