Manny Ruiz, 53, makes his living restoring vintage typewriters out of a converted cinder block garage behind his small Ohio rental, and he’s spent the last seven years perfecting the art of being left alone. He bailed on his last friend group three years ago when he moved to the college town, hasn’t been on a date since his divorce was finalized, and has a strict rule against talking to neighbors—messy, he calls it, too easy for awkward small talk to turn into something he can’t walk away from if it goes south. He only showed up to the downtown Oktoberfest block party because a 72 year old regular customer had begged him to hand deliver the custom 1960s Smith Corona he’d restored for her granddaughter’s 21st birthday, and he’d owed the woman a favor for hooking him up with a box of rare typewriter parts last spring.
He’s holding a cold local amber in one hand, the hard plastic typewriter case in the other, and has just waved off the granddaughter and her group of friends when he turns too fast and bumps straight into someone soft, half a warm soft pretzel smearing spicy yellow mustard across the forearm of his gray flannel shirt. He’s ready to apologize, already reaching for a napkin in his pocket, when he hears a low, throaty laugh he recognizes from over the fence. It’s Clara, his across the street neighbor, the one he’s deliberately avoided speaking to for two full months, ever since he’d watched her move in with a U-Haul and a tall, broad-shouldered kid he’d assumed was her husband.
She’s wearing a worn navy wool coat and scuffed leather boots, her dark hair pulled back in a messy braid, and she’s already dabbing at the mustard on his sleeve with a crumpled napkin from her own pocket, leaning in so close he can smell the vanilla lotion on her skin and the spiced hard cider on her breath. Her knuckles brush his forearm as she wipes, and he freezes, suddenly hyper aware of the cold air nipping at his ears, the oompah band wailing an off-key version of a Johnny Cash song two tents over, the crunch of fallen maple leaves under their boots. She pulls back after a second, holding his eye contact, a teasing grin tugging at the corner of her mouth, and says she was starting to think he was either a hermit or avoiding her on purpose.
He stammers out an apology, admits he’d thought the kid helping her move was her husband, didn’t want to overstep, and she snorts, shaking her head, telling him that’s her 19 year old son, a mechanical engineering major at the local college, who crashes at her place on weekends when he’s tired of dorm food. She teases him about the two batches of chocolate chip cookies she’d left on his front porch in the last month, says she’d started to think he hated them, and he winces, admits he’d found them, eaten every single one, had just been too much of a coward to knock on her door and say thank you.
They end up leaning against the sun-warmed brick wall of the corner bookstore for the next 40 minutes, talking over the roar of the crowd, their shoulders brushing every time a group of drunk college students runs past. She tells him she works in the special collections department at the college library, has a closet full of broken vintage typewriters she’s been too nervous to bring to his shop, thought he’d turn her away for being a nuisance. He tells her about the divorce, about the rule he made for himself about not letting anyone get too close, says he hasn’t had a real conversation with someone who isn’t a customer dropping off a typewriter in over a year. When a gust of wind picks up, sending a shower of red and orange leaves swirling around them, she grabs his elbow to steady herself as she stumbles back a step, and he doesn’t pull away.
She asks him if he wants to skip the rest of the festival, head back to her place, says she’s got a bottle of small batch bourbon she’s been saving for a good occasion, and a beat up 1954 Royal typewriter she found at a yard sale that’s stuck shut, could use his opinion. For half a second, his old rule blares in his head, warns him about messy neighborhood drama, about getting his heart broken again, about how good things always fall apart if you let them get too close. But she’s looking up at him, her dark eyes bright, half teasing half hopeful, and he can’t bring himself to say no. He nods, says that sounds better than listening to the band butcher another country song.
They walk the three blocks back to their street slowly, their hands brushing every few steps, not close enough to hold, but close enough that he can feel the heat of her skin through her glove. She unlocks her front door, holds it open for him, and the warm smell of cinnamon and burning oak hits him as he steps over the threshold. When she turns to hang her coat on the hook by the door, he catches a flash of the small Orion constellation tattoo behind her ear, the same one he’d stared at through his kitchen window two weeks prior when she’d been smoking a cigarette on her back porch at midnight, and feels the last of his stubborn resistance melt away.
