Roland Voss, 62, spent 30 years as a forensic accountant digging through embezzlement schemes for the state of North Carolina, quit the day his wife Diane’s urn hit the mantel, now restores vintage typewriters out of his cinder block garage for pocket money and the quiet, steady hum of metal clicking into place. He only leaves the house two nights a week: Tuesday to drop off repaired units at the downtown independent book shop, Thursday for the weekly bluegrass jam at Maple Street Taproom, where he sits in on rhythm guitar and drinks neat bourbon until the permanent knot between his shoulder blades unclenches. He’s got a strict, unbroken rule: no talking to anyone longer than it takes to order a drink or agree on a song key. It’s worked perfectly for eight years.
He’s tuning the G string on his scuffed 1964 Martin D-18 when the soft crash comes, almost lost under the fiddle player warming up a few stools down. The new line cook, the one who started two weeks prior with a thin purple streak in her salt-and-pepper hair, slipped on a puddle of seltzer some tween spilled an hour earlier, the tray of loaded chili-lime nachos she’s carrying tilting so far she has to grab the first solid thing within reach to keep from face-planting into a table of rowdy retired construction workers. That solid thing is Roland’s left forearm. Her palm is warm, calloused along the edges from hauling 50-pound stock sacks and chopping onions all shift, and she smells like smoked paprika and lemon dish soap, no fancy perfume, no frills. She pulls back fast, apologizing so fast her words run together, wiping her hand on her grease-stained navy flannel like she’s afraid she left a mark. He stares at the faint red smudge of chili powder she left on his own flannel sleeve, then up at her face. Her eyes are hazel, crinkled at the corners like she laughs more than he has in the last decade, and for half a second he forgets how to speak, the familiar sharp twist of guilt coiling in his chest before he can stop it. He mumbles that it’s fine, no harm done, and turns back to his guitar like that’s the end of it.
It’s not the end of it. He catches himself glancing at her all through the jam, while he’s picking the lead on “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” while the banjo player hoots and whoops, while he’s switching to soft rhythm for a slower Hank Williams cover, while he’s wiping sweat off his brow between sets. She’s leaning against the back counter when she’s not running orders, wiping down pint glasses with a frayed rag, tapping her scuffed steel-toe work boot in time to the beat, her eyes fixed on his hands on the guitar neck. Halfway through the third set, she walks over with a fresh pour of bourbon, slides it across the bar to him without him asking. “You always drink it neat, no ice,” she says, leaning in so he can hear her over the crowd, her shoulder a few inches from his, so close he can smell that paprika again, warm and bright. “My dad used to drink it the same way. Refill’s on the house, for not letting me face-plant into a pile of nachos in front of half the town.” He stares at the glass, then at her left wrist, where a tiny black tattoo of a typewriter shift key peeks out from under her rolled sleeve. He nods at it, voice rough when he speaks. “That why you’ve got ink stains on your thumb?” She blinks, looks down at her hand, laughs, a low warm sound that settles in his chest somewhere the guilt can’t reach right away. “Grandma left me her Royal Quiet De Luxe when she died. Shift key’s been stuck for three years. Couldn’t find anyone around here who knows how to fix the old ones, not the hobbyists who mess around on Etsy.”
The jam wraps up at 10, same as always, and when Roland steps outside to walk home, the sky’s pouring rain, so hard it’s bouncing off the asphalt hard enough to sting exposed skin, his flannel soaked through in 10 seconds flat. He’s standing under the awning fumbling for his phone to call an Uber when she pulls up in a beat up dark green Subaru Outback, the passenger window rolled down, rain spattering the door frame. “C’mon,” she yells over the drumming of the rain on the roof. “I live two blocks from your neighborhood, I saw your address on the typewriter drop off list last week when you brought that 1950s Remington in for the kid at the book shop. I’ll even let you look at that Royal, if you want. Got a bottle of 12 year bourbon I’ve been saving for a good excuse.”
He hesitates, the familiar guilt flaring again, sharp as a misaligned typewriter key to the palm, thinking of Diane’s framed photo on his kitchen fridge, the 40 years they had together, the stupid promise he made himself the week after she died that he’d never even consider letting anyone else get close. He looks at her, grinning from the driver’s seat, rain dripping off the end of her faded purple streak onto her flannel collar, and the guilt softens, doesn’t disappear entirely, but stops feeling like a punishment he has to carry forever. He reaches for the door handle, pauses when she leans across the center console, her thumb brushing a fleck of black typewriter ink off his jaw he’d missed that morning, the rough pad of her thumb catching on the two days of stubble he’d been too lazy to shave. The contact sends a jolt up his spine he hasn’t felt in a decade, and he doesn’t pull away.
He pulls open the passenger door, climbs in, shakes rain off his beat up wool hat onto the floor mat, and tells her he’ll fix the Royal for free, as long as she saves him a heaping plate of those chili-lime nachos before the jam starts next Thursday.
