Manny Ruiz, 59, has restored antique typewriters for 32 years, and hasn’t set foot in the River Arts District’s weekly beer garden since his wife, Elaina, died of ovarian cancer six years prior. His default move when people ask him to tag along is a dry, sarcastic zinger about preferring the smell of machine oil over fried pickles and bad cover bands, a defense mechanism he’s honed so well even his own sister has stopped pestering him to socialize. The only reason he’s here now is he burned through the last of his stock of size 12 rubber typewriter feet, and the only person within 100 miles who has the exact vintage spec he needs is Clara Bennett, the woman who bought his old shop space when he bailed on the district in 2021. He’s avoided her for two full years, convinced she sees him as the grumpy old coot who abandoned a perfectly good storefront to hide in a basement workshop on the edge of town.
The sun dips low enough to gild the tops of the oak trees lining the river when she spots him, leaning against a splintered pine picnic table with a hazy IPA in one hand, pretending to be engrossed in the bluegrass band’s twangy cover of a 90s country deep cut. She’s carrying a canvas tote slung over one shoulder, a can of black cherry hard seltzer in her other hand, and she stops three inches from his elbow, close enough that he can smell the lavender of her hand lotion over the tang of beer and fried food drifting from the food truck line. She holds eye contact for half a beat longer than polite, no sharp edge to her smile, and he doesn’t immediately make a joke to chase her off.
She pulls a crinkled plastic bag of the rubber feet out of her tote, and when she passes it to him, their fingers brush. He feels the rough callus on her index finger, earned from months of cutting custom cardstock for her print shop, and she pauses for half a second, like she’s noting the calluses on his own hands from sanding rusted typewriter frames. He doesn’t yank his hand away, even though a little voice in his head is screaming that he’s being disrespectful to Elaina, that he has no right to notice how the sun streaks the dark strands of her hair, how the hem of her cutoffs has a frayed edge at the thigh.
She asks if she can sit, and he nods, sliding down the bench to make space. Their knees knock under the table when she sits, and neither of them shifts away. She tells him she found a box of his old repair tickets tucked in the back of a closet when she was renovating the shop’s storage space last month, that she’s been holding onto them because half of them have little doodles Elaina drew in the margins, little suns and cats and stick figures of Manny hunched over a typewriter. His throat goes tight, and he doesn’t make a joke about her snooping, just stares at the label on his beer can like it holds the secrets of the universe. He’d forgotten Elaina used to doodle on those tickets, had spent six years trying not to think about the little things that made the shop feel like home.
The band switches to a slow, drawling cover of Johnny Cash’s “I Walk the Line,” the song he and Elaina danced to at their wedding, and he feels his eyes burn. Clara doesn’t push him to talk, just leans back against the bench, her shoulder brushing his, and sips her seltzer. He’s spent six years disgusted with himself any time he even thought about letting another woman get close, convinced he was replacing the only person who ever got him, but sitting there, with the warm sun on his neck and the banjo twanging in the background, he realizes Elaina would have chewed him out for hiding away for so long, for letting the shop he loved fall to someone else and then avoiding her out of some stupid, misplaced guilt.
He asks her if she wants to come by his workshop the next afternoon, that he’s got a 1952 Underwood he just finished restoring that would be perfect for the custom calligraphy work she advertises on her shop’s Instagram, that he’ll knock 40 percent off the price if she brings him the box of old repair tickets. She grins, the corners of her eyes crinkling, and taps the back of his hand with her palm before she stands up to meet a group of her friends by the food truck. He watches her walk away, takes a long sip of his beer, and for the first time in six years, he doesn’t feel like rushing home to a dark, quiet house full of nothing but typewriters and old memories.
