Rafe Muñoz, 62, spent 30 years as an antique typewriter restorer out of his workshop in eastern Oregon, and his biggest flaw was that he’d spent the last 12 years treating any romantic attention like it was a scam waiting to happen. His ex-wife had left him for a 29-year-old wind turbine technician, and the whole mess had left him convinced any woman under 50 who so much as smiled at him was either after his small retirement savings or looking for a cheap laugh at the gray-haired guy with permanent ink under his fingernails. He’d avoided the local farmers market for three years straight, but a friend had talked him into setting up a stall to sell a handful of restored midcentury portables, and now he was sweating through his faded Carhartt shirt under the July sun, wiping smudges off a 1956 Royal Quiet De Luxe when a shadow fell across his table.
He looked up, and his throat went tight. Lila Marlow was 48, his ex-wife’s first cousin, and he hadn’t seen her since the divorce papers were signed. She was wearing cutoff denim shorts, scuffed work boots, and a faded Joni Mitchell tee, a plaid flannel tied loose around her waist, sun streaking the brown hair pulled back in a messy braid, freckles dusting her nose that he’d forgotten were there. She’d always been the quiet one at family gatherings, the one who sat in the corner reading while his ex screamed at him for forgetting to pick up wine for dinner, and he’d always felt a weird, unnameable soft spot for her that he’d squashed down hard out of loyalty.
She leaned in, elbows on the edge of his table, and the scent of lavender and pine soap hit him, sharp and sweet over the smell of grilled corn from the food truck two stalls over and the distant twang of the bluegrass band playing at the end of the market. “That Royal’s the one I’ve been looking for for months,” she said, and her voice was lower than he remembered, rough around the edges like she spent half her time yelling over noisy college lecture halls. He remembered now, she taught creative writing at the community college 20 minutes outside town, had been for 15 years.
He nodded, reached for the stack of blank printer paper he kept under the table to let customers test the keys, and his hand brushed hers when she reached for the typewriter’s chrome carriage at the same time. The jolt was immediate, hot, running up his arm all the way to the back of his neck, and he pulled his hand back like he’d touched a hot soldering iron. She didn’t flinch, just held eye contact, the hazel flecks in her green eyes glinting in the sun, and he felt his face heat up. For a second he was sure she’d laugh, call him a pathetic old creep, walk away and tell his ex he’d hit on her.
Instead, she ran a finger along the edge of the typewriter’s worn leather case, her nail chipped with navy polish, and said, “I still have the old Smith Corona you fixed for me at my college graduation. You spent 10 minutes on it, didn’t even charge me. Said anyone who wanted to write poetry deserved a working machine.” He blinked, surprised she remembered. That had been 26 years prior, he’d been so wrapped up in his still-new marriage he’d barely thought about it after the fact. He mumbled something about it being no big deal, adjusted his frayed baseball cap to hide the gray hair sticking out at the edges, and for the next 40 minutes they talked, him walking her through the typewriter’s quirks, her telling him about her students, how half of them had never typed on anything that wasn’t a laptop keyboard. She leaned in closer every time he explained something, her shoulder almost brushing his, and he could hear the smile in her voice even when he was staring at the typewriter keys, too nervous to meet her eyes.
By the time the market started closing down, vendors folding up their tables, the bluegrass band packing their instruments, she’d bought the Royal, and she was still standing there, leaning against his table, twisting the end of her braid between her fingers. “You wanna get a beer?” she asked, nodding at the dive bar two blocks over, the one with the neon Pabst sign in the window that had been half-broken for as long as he could remember. His first instinct was to say no, to tell her it was weird, that he was too old, that her cousin would lose her mind if she found out. But then she looked up at him, grinning a little like she knew exactly what he was thinking, and he found himself saying yes before he could talk himself out of it.
The booth in the back of the bar was sticky with old soda and beer, the jukebox playing Johnny Cash deep cuts so loud the table vibrated a little, and she sat so close their thighs brushed under the table every time one of them shifted. She told him she’d split from her husband two years prior, that he’d hated her writing, hated that she spent more time with her students than with him, that she’d always thought he was too good for her cousin, that she’d had a crush on him since she was 22 years old. He sat there, frozen, holding his cold beer bottle so tight his knuckles went white, fighting the war in his head between the voice that told him this was wrong, that he was setting himself up to get hurt again, and the warm, thrumming desire that had been building in his chest since she first walked up to his stall.
She reached across the table then, brushed a strand of gray hair off his forehead, her palm warm against his cheek for a beat longer than necessary, and he didn’t pull away. “You don’t have to be scared of me,” she said, soft, so quiet he almost didn’t hear her over the jukebox. He drank the last of his beer, stood up, and held out his hand for her. She took it, her fingers lacing through his, the callus on her index finger from holding pens for hours fitting perfectly against the ink-stained calluses on his own hands. They walked out of the bar into the cool summer dark, fireflies flickering in the oak trees lining the street, and she leaned her shoulder against his as they headed toward his small cottage on the edge of town, the typewriter tucked under her other arm.
