Earl Hawthorne, 62, made his living restoring vintage typewriters for collectors across the Southeast until a bad shoulder forced him to semi-retire three years prior. His biggest flaw, per the only friend he still spoke to regularly, was a stubborn refusal to engage with anything invented after 1999: no smartphones, no social media, no contactless payment, just a beat-up flip phone he kept in his truck for emergencies and a landline he only answered if the caller ID matched the three people he cared to hear from. He’d lived alone in his clapboard cottage 10 miles outside Asheville since his wife, Elaine, passed eight years prior, only venturing into town once a week for hardware supplies and a cold pilsner at the dive bar off Main.
He’d been dragged to the town’s summer block party against his will by his neighbor’s 16-year-old son, who’d helped him haul a crate of 1960s Remingtons to his workshop that afternoon and refused payment unless Earl came with him to get a free snow cone. Earl had stood pressed against the brick wall of the old hardware store for 45 minutes, warm beer in a flimsy plastic cup, glowering at the crowd of influencers taking selfies in front of the neon mural that had replaced his old barber shop six months prior. The air smelled like grilled hot dogs and citronella candles, the pop cover of a Tom Petty song blaring from the stage by the courthouse making his teeth ache.
He was two minutes from bailing when a woman tripped over a loose curb stone three feet from his boots, dropping a cardboard box full of poetry collections right at his feet. He bent down automatically to help her pick them up, his hand brushing hers when they both reached for the same tattered copy of Mary Oliver’s *Devotions*. He felt the thick callus on her index finger, worn there from decades of turning book pages, and caught a whiff of old paper, cedar, and a faint hint of jasmine perfume before he looked up. It was Marisol Reyes, 58, owner of the used bookstore that had moved into the old barber shop space two weeks prior. She was also Elaine’s cousin’s ex-wife, the woman he’d almost kissed in the parking lot after Elaine’s funeral, before he’d panicked and pulled away, too wrapped up in guilt to admit he’d been attracted to her for years before Elaine got sick.
She held his gaze for three beats too long, a lazy smirk tugging at the corner of her mouth when she spotted the tiny Royal typewriter pin fastened to the lapel of his frayed flannel shirt. She was wearing a faded 1992 Pearl Jam tour tee, high-waisted jeans, and work boots caked in the same red clay that dusted the floor of his workshop, a smudge of blue ink on her left cheek. She made a joke about the mural looking like it had been painted by a caffeinated toddler, and Earl laughed before he could stop himself, a rough, rusty sound he hadn’t heard come out of his own mouth in months.
They stood against the brick wall for the next hour, passing his beer back and forth when she complained the peach cider she’d bought was too sweet, their shoulders brushing every time someone from the crowd squeezed past them on the sidewalk. He told her about the typewriter he’d been hunting for six months, a 1951 Royal Quiet De Luxe with a custom wood case, and her eyes lit up. She said she’d found exactly that model tucked in the bottom of a box of donations she’d picked up the week prior, had been meaning to track him down to ask if he wanted it, since everyone in town said he was the only person who knew how to fix them right.
The crowd thinned out as the sun dipped below the Blue Ridge Mountains, the air turning cool enough that Earl could see his breath when he exhaled. She invited him back to the bookstore to see the typewriter, and he followed her without hesitation, his boots thudding against the hardwood floors when she unlocked the front door and flipped on the string lights strung above the checkout counter. The whole place smelled like her, old paper and cedar and jasmine, shelves lined with leather-bound classics and beat-up pulp fiction stacked all the way to the ceiling.
She pulled the Royal out from under the back counter, setting it on the countertop between them, and when Earl leaned in to run his finger over the polished wood case, she leaned in too, her chest pressing against his upper arm. He looked up, and she was already looking at him, no smirk this time, just soft dark eyes, and when she leaned in to kiss him, he didn’t pull away. The kiss was slow, sweet, tasted like peach cider and spearmint gum, her hand coming up to rest on the back of his neck, her nails scratching lightly against the short gray hair at his nape.
He sat down on the stool behind the counter after they pulled apart, feeding a scrap of receipt paper into the typewriter, typing out the first line of the Oliver poem they’d both grabbed off the sidewalk earlier: Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? He slid the paper across the counter to her, and she tucked it into the pocket of her jeans, leaning in to kiss him again quick, before she told him to come back the next morning at 10, she’d have coffee and blueberry pancakes, no phones allowed, no talk of the past unless they wanted to. He nodded, grabbing the typewriter case by the handle, walking out to his old Ford F150 parked two blocks over. He turned the key in the ignition, and Pearl Jam’s “Alive” blared from the vintage radio he’d restored himself, and he turned the volume up all the way, grinning as he pulled out onto the empty main street.
