Hugo Voss, 62, shows up to the Butler County VFW fish fry every Friday at 6:17 sharp, rain, shine, or the random western Pennsylvania snow squall that hits in mid-April. He’s a retired forensic entomologist turned vintage typewriter restorer, has spent the last eight years intentionally walling himself off from any interaction that doesn’t involve pricing a new ribbon for a 1952 Royal KMM or testifying in the rare cold case that calls for his old expertise. His flaw, if you asked the few people who still know him, is that he’s convinced any flicker of romantic or even casual warm interest in another person is a betrayal of his late wife Marnie, who died of ovarian cancer three months after he retired. He grabs his usual platter of cod, extra coleslaw, and a rye on the rocks, slides into the scuffed vinyl back booth he’s claimed as his own, and doesn’t look up until a shadow falls across his table.
He blinks. The woman leaning against the booth edge is a stranger at first, wavy auburn hair streaked with silver, worn denim shirt rolled to the elbows, a thin silver scar wrapping around her left wrist. She’s wiping a stray splash of beer off the table edge with a rag, and her forearm brushes his knuckles when she reaches across, warm, calloused, smelling like lavender and pine cleaner. The scar trips a memory he hasn’t pulled up in 22 years: a family picnic at Pymatuning Reservoir, 19-year-old Elara, Marnie’s baby cousin, falling off the fishing boat he’d borrowed, slicing her wrist open on a rusted cleat. He’d driven her to the ER, held her hand while she got 11 stitches, and tried not to stare at the way her freckles dusted across her nose when she laughed at him for panicking so hard. She moved to Oregon two weeks after he and Marnie got married, and he hasn’t seen her since.
She smirks, leans her hip against the booth, and holds his gaze longer than a casual acquaintance would, her hazel eyes crinkling at the corners. “You still look like you’re counting maggot instars every time you frown, Hugo,” she says, and her voice is lower than he remembers, rougher around the edges, like she’s spent years yelling over bar crowds or campfires. He freezes, halfway to lifting his rye glass, torn between the jolt of heat that shoots up his spine at the sound of his name in her mouth, and the sharp, cold twist of guilt that he’s even noticing how good she looks, how the worn denim fits her shoulders, how the scar is exactly the same as he remembered. He should leave, he thinks. Pay his tab, get in his beat up Ford F150, go home to his empty house and his half-restored Underwood No. 5, pretend this never happened. He doesn’t move.
They talk for two hours, long after the last of the fish fry crowd has filtered out, long after the jukebox has switched from Johnny Cash to old Patsy Cline deep cuts. She tells him she moved back last month to take care of her dad, who’s got early stage COPD, took the bartending gig at the VFW because the hours are flexible, got divorced 12 years ago after her ex husband decided he’d rather be a ski bum in Aspen than stay married to someone who wanted to put down roots. He tells her about the typewriter business, about the cold case he testified in last year that put a 30-year-old murderer behind bars, about how he hasn’t laughed this much since Marnie was alive. Halfway through a story about a client who tried to bring him a typewriter that had been chewed up by a black bear, she slides into the booth across from him, her knee brushing his under the table, and he doesn’t pull away. He’s spent eight years telling himself this kind of thing is wrong, that wanting anything other than the quiet, lonely life he’s built is a slap in the face to Marnie’s memory, but right now, looking at Elara’s smile, listening to her laugh, he can’t summon an ounce of that old guilt.
When the VFW manager locks up for the night, he walks her to her beat up Subaru Outback in the gravel parking lot, light rain misting down, soaking the collar of his flannel shirt. She pulls her phone out of her pocket, holds it out to him, and asks him to put his number in, says she’s got her mom’s old 1948 Underwood sitting in her guest room, needs it fixed, wants him to come over tomorrow to look at it. Their fingers brush when he takes the phone from her, warm, electric, and he doesn’t hesitate when she leans in to hug him goodbye, her arms wrapping around his waist, her head resting on his shoulder for a beat longer than necessary.
He drives home slow, the rain tapping against the windshield, the photo of Marnie taped to his dashboard glinting under the streetlights. He doesn’t feel guilty, doesn’t feel like he’s doing something wrong. He thinks Marnie would laugh herself sick at him for being so stupidly nervous, for waiting eight years to stop hiding from the world. He pulls into his driveway, walks out to his garage workshop, pulls a new set of Underwood repair parts off the shelf, and sets them on the workbench next to the half finished typewriter he’s been working on for three weeks. He pours himself a small glass of rye, leans against the workbench, and smiles, slow and easy, for the first time in years without having to force it.
