Roland Voss, 61, spends most days alone in his garage outside Ashland, prying stuck carriage returns off 1960s typewriters and drinking coffee strong enough to strip paint. He’s been a full-time antique typewriter restorer for seven years, ever since his wife Elara died of breast cancer and he sold the small print shop they ran together for 28 years. His biggest flaw is he’s turned down every invite to community events, family dinners, even the local fishing group his old coworker begs him to join, convinced any new joy would be a betrayal of the life he built with Elara. The only reason he’s at the town’s October craft fair is his 17-year-old niece signed him up for the booth as a surprise, saying he needed to “stop talking to broken machines and start talking to actual people.”
The air smells like pine and fried apple cider donuts from the food truck at the end of the row, and Roland’s flannel is thin enough that the wind nips at his elbows every few minutes. He’s flipping through a tattered 1972 typewriter repair manual when a soft voice pulls his gaze up. The woman running the herbal apothecary booth next to his is leaning over the shared folding table, holding a half-empty elderberry syrup bottle that’s leaking purple sticky goop onto the tablecloth. She asks if he has a spare paper towel, and when he reaches across the table to hand her the roll from his supply box, their fingers brush. Her skin is warm even through the thin paper, and he notices her hazel eyes crinkle at the corners exactly like her mom’s did, back when he dated Clara Carter senior year of high school, before he left to work fire crews for the forest service.
He realizes then who she is: Lila, Clara’s daughter, the little girl he’d held at Clara’s wedding when she was 10 months old, all chubby cheeks and curly red hair. She’s 42 now, he remembers Clara mentioning a few years back she’d moved back to town after a messy divorce, opening a small apothecary downtown. The thought sparks a hot, sharp twist of shame in his gut, and he yanks his hand back like he’s been burned. He tells himself it’s wrong, to even notice the way her faded denim jacket fits her shoulders, the smudge of dried chamomile on her wrist, the way she tucks strands of that same red hair behind her ear when she laughs at a kid who runs past with a face full of cotton candy. He spends the next hour pointedly staring at the typewriters on his table, ignoring the way he can smell lavender and burnt sugar drifting over from her booth, ignoring the little jolts of something he hasn’t felt in eight years every time she speaks to a customer.
The crowd thins out around 3 PM, dark clouds rolling in over the Siskiyous, and Lila leans over the table again, this time holding a small glass jar of honey-lemon throat lozenges. She says she’s seen him coughing all morning, that the lozenges work better than any drugstore crap. He takes them, his fingers brushing hers again, and this time he doesn’t yank away. They start talking, slow at first, then easier. She tells him she’s been dropping off vintage typewriters she found at estate sales on his porch for the past three months, too nervous to knock, because her mom always talked about how he was the only boy who ever encouraged her to go to art school, instead of telling her to get a secretarial job like everyone else did back then. He tells her about Elara, about the print shop, about how he stopped leaving the house except to go to the post office for supply orders. He doesn’t realize how close they’re leaning until their shoulders press together when he reaches over to show her how the shift key works on a mint 1958 Smith Corona, and he can feel the heat of her arm through his flannel.
The first raindrop hits the typewriter he’s holding right as he finishes typing her name on a piece of scrap paper, curly red letters across cream cardstock. The fair announcer yells over the speaker that they’re shutting down early for the storm, and wind picks up so fast it blows half her stack of dried lavender bundles off her table, right into his lap. The scent hits him immediately, soft and earthy, and when he looks up to hand them to her, their faces are six inches apart, rain already dripping off the edge of the pop-up canopy onto her cheek. She reaches up and brushes a pine needle off the collar of his flannel, her thumb grazing the stubble on his jaw for half a second, and says she has a bottle of small-batch bourbon at her cottage ten minutes away, if he wants to come help her test the new honey tincture she made for winter colds.
Roland hesitates for two full seconds, the shame he felt earlier warring with the warm, bright spark of excitement sitting low in his chest, the first he’s felt since Elara died. He thinks of the empty house waiting for him, the stack of broken typewriters on his workbench, the way Lila’s eyes are crinkled just like her mom’s, like she already knows what he’s going to say. He nods, grabbing his thermos from the table, and helps her stack her boxes of tinctures and dried herbs, the lavender scent clinging to his jeans and his flannel. They run across the muddy fairground to her beat-up Subaru, rain soaking through the cuffs of his jeans, her laugh carrying over the sound of the wind and the distant rumble of thunder. He shifts the stack of glass tincture bottles higher against his chest, stepping over a deep puddle so she doesn’t get her scuffed suede boots wet.
