Manny Ruiz, 59, makes his living restoring antique typewriters out of a cramped, sun-faded shop in downtown Asheville, and has spent the seven years since his wife’s cancer death keeping everyone at arm’s length. He only agrees to come to the summer neighborhood block party because the coffee shop owner next door threatens to stop saving him the extra dark roast every morning if he bails. He shows up 20 minutes late, a jar of home-canned wild blackberry jam tucked under one arm, a cheap lager in a faded Atlanta Braves koozie in the other, and parks himself against an exposed brick wall between his shop and the vintage record store, figuring he can slip out after 10 minutes of polite nodding. The air smells like charcoal smoke, cherry Kool-Aid, and fresh-cut grass, kids scream as they chase each other with water guns, and the 80s rock cover band down the block is butchering a John Mellencamp track so bad he almost smiles.
She walks over first. He’s seen her before, of course: the new owner of the succulent shop two doors down, the one who hangs string lights around her storefront and leaves tiny potted cacti on the sidewalk for strangers to take for free. Lila, he thinks her name is, mid-40s, has a thin scar curving over her left eyebrow like a half moon, wears work boots with hand-painted sunflowers on the toes. She’s holding a paper plate heaped with grilled street corn, lime juice dripping down her wrist, and she steps so close the scent of coconut sunscreen and cilantro wraps around him before she even speaks. She leans in half an inch to avoid a kid hauling a tray of cupcakes zooming past, and her bare shoulder brushes his bicep, warm through the thin cotton of his unbuttoned flannel shirt. He tenses automatically, used to keeping a three-foot buffer between himself and everyone else, but he doesn’t step back.
“Hey, you’re the typewriter guy, right?” Her voice is rough, like she smokes a pack a day or yells at bad drivers for fun, both things he finds weirdly attractive. She holds out the plate to him, and when he takes a piece of corn, their fingers brush, her silver rings cold against his calloused knuckles. A jolt runs up his arm, the kind he hasn’t felt since he was 16 and kissed a girl for the first time in the back of his dad’s beat-up pickup. He feels stupid for it, 59 years old, acting like a teenager over a stray touch, but he doesn’t pull away.
They talk for 15 minutes, and he learns she moved here from Phoenix three months prior after her divorce, that her dad was a small-town journalist who left her his beat-up Underwood No. 5 when he died, that she’d been meaning to bring it by his shop for weeks but was scared he’d be the grouchy recluse everyone made him out to be. He laughs, an actual honest laugh, when she says that, and is about to tell her he’d fix the Underwood for half price if she brings him a plate of her street corn every week when the sky opens up. It’s the kind of sudden summer thunderstorm that hits out of nowhere, fat cold raindrops pouring down so fast you can barely see three feet in front of you. Everyone screams and scatters, grabbing coolers and folding chairs, and before he can think, she’s grabbing his wrist, pulling him under the narrow awning over his shop front.
They’re both soaked, her white linen shirt sticking to her shoulders, water dripping off the brim of his baseball cap onto the cracked sidewalk. She pushes a strand of wet dark hair out of her face, and her hazel eyes, flecked with streaks of bright gold, lock onto his, no shyness now. “I’ve been watching you, you know,” she says, quiet enough only he can hear, over the patter of rain on the awning. “You eat a turkey sandwich on rye on the bench outside your shop every Wednesday at 12:30. You always feed half of it to the stray calico cat that hangs around the back of the strip first, before you take a bite. I’ve been wanting to ask you to get lunch with me for weeks, but I thought you’d tell me to get lost.”
He freezes, because he thought he’d been invisible for seven years, that no one paid any attention to the quiet guy who fixed old typewriters and never talked to anyone. For half a second he feels that familiar twist of guilt, of disgust at himself for even considering saying yes, for thinking he could have something good again after losing his wife, but then she reaches out, her hand resting lightly on his forearm, warm even through his damp shirt, and the guilt melts away. He feels seen, for the first time in years. “I stop by your shop window every night after I lock up,” he says, quiet, like he’s admitting a secret he hasn’t told anyone. “Look at the succulents you arrange on the sill. They’re bright. Make the walk to my truck less boring.”
He doesn’t hesitate, doesn’t make up some excuse about having work to do or being tired, the way he’d done every other time someone invited him somewhere in the last seven years. He nods, picks up the jar of blackberry jam he’d set down on the sidewalk when they ran for cover, twists off the lid, dips his index finger in the thick, sweet jam, and holds it out to her.
She leans in, wraps her lips around his finger, and hums soft at the taste, her eyes never leaving his.
