Moe Pritchard, 57, owns a one-man custom hardwood flooring business out of his garage in southwest Ohio, hasn’t willingly attended a neighborhood event since his wife left him for a long-haul trucker four years prior. He only showed up to the October block party because his 82-year-old next door neighbor banged on his door at 9 a.m. holding a stack of paper plates, said the new HOA board was fining anyone who skipped, and Moe hated wasting money more than he hated small talk. He brought a crockpot of the chili he makes every Sunday, the same recipe he’s used since he was 20, heavy on habaneros and kidney beans, mostly for weeknight work lunches when he’s too sore to cook after kneeling on floor joists for 10 hours.
He leaned against the thick bark of the oak tree at the edge of the cul-de-sac, sipping a $3 lager he grabbed from the community cooler, watching a group of 7-year-olds scream as they launched each other off the edge of a rented bounce house, trying to calculate the earliest he could slip back to his garage and sand the cab of his 1972 Ford F-100 without anyone noticing. That’s when she walked over.
Lena Voss, 48, moved into the bungalow three houses down three weeks prior, widowed two years earlier when her husband died of a sudden heart attack, ran a rare used poetry bookstore out of her spare bedroom, shipped orders all over the country. She was wearing a faded green flannel, high-waisted black jeans, steel-toe work boots caked in drywall dust, a smudge of charcoal on her left cheek from hanging built-in bookshelves that morning. She stood close enough that he could smell pine hand soap and cinnamon gum on her breath, no flowery perfume, no overdone makeup, just the sharp, clean smell of someone who works with their hands.
“Is that your chili by the cooler?” she asked, nodding toward the crockpot he’d left by the chip trays, holding a paper bowl half full of it in one hand. “I just had a bite. Tastes like the stuff my dad used to make when we’d go deer hunting up in Michigan. Best thing I’ve eaten since I moved here.”
Moe grunted first, then caught himself, cleared his throat. “Yeah. Nothing fancy. Just throw a bunch of stuff in a pot.” He shifted his weight, the scar across his left knuckle from a nail gun accident last spring catching the golden hour sun, and he saw her eyes flick to it, then back up to his face, no polite look away, no awkward apology for staring. Her elbow brushed his when she reached to grab a napkin off the folding table next to him, warm through the thin flannel, and he felt a jolt go up his arm he hadn’t felt in years.
He fought the urge to step back, to make an excuse about having to get back to a work project, to shut down the quiet, stupid flutter in his chest that felt like he was 16 again asking a girl to prom. He hated that feeling, hated that he was even entertaining the idea of talking to her longer than 30 seconds, told himself she was just being nice, that she didn’t actually care about the chili, or his scar, or the fact that he wore a worn Carhartt jacket with his company logo stitched on the chest that had a coffee stain on the cuff he’d never bothered to wash.
They talked for 40 minutes, he realized later, no awkward pauses, no forced small talk about the weather. She complained about the HOA board sending her three letters in two weeks about the dead rose bushes in her front yard, he complained about the local lumber yard jacking up oak plank prices 30% in the last six months. She laughed when he told the story about his apprentice gluing his work boot to a newly finished floor last month, laughed so hard she snort-laughed, and he found himself smiling without even trying.
She mentioned the original hardwood floors under the shag carpet in her bungalow, water damaged from a leaky roof the previous owners never fixed, said she’d gotten three quotes to refinish them, all way out of her budget, that she was starting to think she’d have to just lay cheap vinyl herself. Moe blurted the offer out before he could stop himself: he’d refinish the floors for cost, no labor charge, as long as she let him use her two-car garage for a month while his was being sided, that he needed the space to work on his F-100. He held his breath after he said it, half expecting her to say no, to think he was being creepy, to turn and walk away.
She grinned, leaned in a little closer, the streak of silver at her temple glowing in the setting sun, and said she’d do him one better: she’d make him a homemade apple pie every week he was working there, plus let him use her extra fridge to store his beer, and he had to help her move a 300 pound oak bookshelf into her spare bedroom on the first day. He agreed before she finished talking.
They exchanged numbers, him fumbling with his old flip phone that he only used for work calls, her typing her contact info in with chipped navy blue nail polish. He walked her to her beat-up Subaru at the end of the block, and when she got to the driver’s side door, she paused, leaned in, and kissed him on the cheek, right where his stubble was the roughest, left a faint pink smudge of lipstick that he didn’t notice until later. “Text me tomorrow, okay?” she said, climbing into the car, closing the door behind her.
He stood there for 12 minutes after she drove off, holding his half-empty beer, the sound of the bounce house kids fading into the background, the cool fall air biting at his cheeks. He didn’t even care that half the neighbors were staring, that he was missing the time he’d set aside to work on his truck. He pulled his flip phone out of his pocket, opened the text thread with her name, and typed the first message, his thumb hovering over the send button for 10 seconds before he pressed it.
