Rico Morales is 57, makes his living restoring vintage typewriters out of a clapboard shop off the main drag of Newport, Oregon, and hasn’t attended the town’s annual summer block party in eight years, not since his wife’s lung cancer took her two weeks before their 25th anniversary. His next door neighbor, a retired elementary school teacher named Marnie, all but dragged him out of his shop an hour prior, shoving a cold hazy IPA in his hand and telling him if he spent one more weekend hunched over a 1940s Underwood covered in machine oil she’d hide all his replacement spools. He’d grumbled the whole walk over, planned to slip out after 20 minutes, but now he’s frozen against the side of the smoked salmon taco truck, beer sweating through the paper coozie in his grip.
He’d spotted her across the crowd ten minutes prior, the new librarian who moved to town three months back. He’d only spoken to her once, when he dropped off a repaired 1952 Royal Quiet De Luxe for the library’s local history display, had been too flustered to do more than mumble a price and leave before she could offer him a coffee. Now she’s wearing a faded 1999 Tom Waits tour tee, frayed cutoff denim shorts, scuffed white Converse caked in beach sand, holding a paper plate of elote slathered in cotija and chili powder, laughing so hard at something the taco vendor said she snorts. She catches him staring, lifts her chin in a quick nod, and starts walking over before he can duck behind the truck.
She stops so close the side of her arm brushes his when a pack of middle schoolers on skateboards zooms past, and he can smell coconut sunscreen, roasted corn, and the faint, sweet tang of margarita mix on her breath. “Thought that was you,” she says, nodding at the machine oil smudge on the side of his jaw he’d forgotten to wash off before he left the shop. She holds out an extra taco wrapped in wax paper, and when he takes it, her ink-stained fingertips brush his calloused knuckles, send a jolt up his arm he hasn’t felt in close to a decade. He’s immediately torn between pulling away, guilty for even feeling that spark when he’s spent eight years acting like the only person he ever could care about is gone, and leaning in, chasing that little jolt that makes him feel less like a ghost walking through his own life.
He doesn’t pull away. They talk for 40 minutes, leaning against the taco truck, yelling over the classic rock cover band playing on the stage at the end of the block. She tells him the library just got a donation of 12 beat up vintage typewriters for a teen writing workshop they’re running next month, she’s been trying to find someone who can teach her the basics of repairing them so she can help the kids fix up their own to take home. He offers to come by the library after hours tomorrow, when there’s no one else around, no regulars hovering by the front desk asking for romance novels, no teens yelling in the YA section. She leans in, so close her hair brushes his cheek, and whispers “I was kind of hoping you’d say that” against his ear, warm and low, and he can taste the lime from her margarita on the air between them.
They slip away from the party 15 minutes later, walk down to the weathered wooden retaining wall that runs along the edge of the bay, sit side by side with their legs dangling over the edge, listening to the small waves crash against the pilings below, watching the sun dip below the horizon to paint the sky pink and tangerine. Their knees knock together every time one of them shifts, and neither of them moves to put space between them. He tells her about his wife, how she used to drag him to the block party every year, how they’d enter the taco eating contest and lose every single time to the same commercial fisherman named Jake. She tells him she moved to Newport after her divorce, wanted to get as far away from her ex-husband’s suburban Ohio law firm as she could, had always dreamed of living somewhere where she could walk to the ocean before work.
He finishes the last of his beer, tosses the empty can in the recycling bin a few feet away, and asks her if she wants to stop by his shop on the way to the library tomorrow. He says he has an extra 1960s Smith Corona he’d been meaning to give away, it’s perfect for beginners, she can practice on it before they work on the library’s batch. She grins, the corner of her mouth tugging up higher on one side, and says she’d like that more than she can say. He tucks a stray strand of wind-tousled auburn hair behind her ear, and for the first time in eight years, he doesn’t wish he was somewhere else.
