Moe Pritchard is 61, makes his living restoring antique typewriters out of a 300-square-foot shop in southeast Portland, and hasn’t deviated from his annual summer street fair routine in 11 years. He shows up right at 4 PM, when the line for the Texas-style brisket stand is shortest, grabs a sandwich and a frozen lemonade, finds the closest unoccupied patch of curb, eats in 8 minutes flat, and heads back to his workbench where a half-finished 1947 Remington waits for a new spring. This year, a group of teens on skateboards take over every inch of curb within 20 feet of the stand, so he detours to the picnic tables tucked next to the craft beer tent.
The only open spot is across from a woman with auburn hair streaked with silver, a smudge of dark soil on her left wrist, and a stack of glass honey jars lined up on the table edge in front of her. He nods, mumbles a greeting, sits down, and takes his first bite of brisket, the smoky fat melting on his tongue. She laughs when a runaway golden retriever darting past makes him fumble his lemonade, drops of sweet, sticky liquid splattering the cuff of his oil-stained work shirt. “They let every dog in the city in here this year,” she says, wiping a crumb of honey cake from her lower lip with the back of her hand. She runs the community garden three blocks from his shop, she tells him, sells raw honey and pickled vegetables at the fair every weekend.
They trade small talk first, complaining about the city’s new paid parking zones that have cut foot traffic to both their small businesses by 30% this quarter, then about the local hardware store that stopped selling the high-quality sandpaper he uses for typewriter bodies and the organic fertilizer she swears by for her heirloom tomato plants. He finds himself leaning forward across the table, elbows on the rough pine wood, for the first time in months not checking the clock on his phone every two minutes. When he reaches for a paper napkin at the same time she does, their hands brush. Her palm is calloused from turning soil and tying tomato vines, warm, and a sharp, quiet jolt zips up his forearm that he hasn’t felt since his ex-wife left him 12 years prior.
His first instinct is to flinch, to make an excuse about unfinished work, to bolt back to the controlled, predictable quiet of his shop where every screw and spring has its assigned place, no unplanned touches or messy, unscripted conversations to throw off his rhythm. He’s already halfway to pushing his chair back when she tilts her head, hazel eyes crinkling at the corners, and asks if he’s got plans for the fireworks show over the waterfront at dusk.
He hesitates for 17 full seconds, counting off the time in his head the way he counts the rotations of a typewriter platen when he’s calibrating it. He thinks about the Remington on his workbench, the three emails he hasn’t replied to from customers asking for status updates, the fact that he never stays out past 7 PM on weekdays. The breeze shifts, and he catches a whiff of lavender from the hand salve she’s wearing, mixed with the faint, sweet smell of clover honey drifting up from the jars next to her. He says yes.
They walk the three blocks to the waterfront side by side, their shoulders brushing every few steps, and he doesn’t shift away. The sky turns soft pink and tangerine as the sun dips below the Willamette, and when the first firework bursts overhead, bright cobalt blue painting the faces of the crowd around them, she leans into his side, her shoulder pressed firm to his ribs. He lifts his arm, wraps it slow around her waist, feels the soft give of her linen shirt against his palm, the warm curve of her hip under the fabric. He doesn’t overthink it, doesn’t run through a list of reasons this is a bad idea, doesn’t worry about what comes next.
When the last firework fades to wispy smoke against the dark sky, she turns to him, and says she baked a peach pie that morning, still sitting on her kitchen counter next to a jar of her homemade whipped cream, if he wants to come over for a slice. He nods, already letting his hand drift down to lace his fingers through hers. Her hand fits perfectly in his, calluses and all, and he doesn’t even remember he left his half-eaten brisket sandwich on the picnic table until they’re halfway to her house.
