Manny Ruiz, 53, has restored over 400 vintage arcade cabinets since he closed his brick-and-mortar arcade in 2018, two years after his divorce went final. His biggest flaw? He writes off everyone under 40 as too glued to their phones to care about anything that doesn’t come with a 24-hour content refresh cycle, so he spends most of his nights alone in his workshop, soldering circuit boards and drinking cheap root beer, only leaving the house every Friday for the VFW post’s all-you-can-eat fish fry.
He’d avoided the new volunteer for three straight weeks the second he heard she was the post commander’s 28-year-old daughter, home from a grad program in Chicago for the semester to help out while her mom recovered from knee surgery. He’d written her off as another overeducated kid who’d look at his calloused, solder-stained hands and see a relic, so he’d taken his plate to the far corner table every Friday, even when the main room had open seats.
Last week, the corner was occupied by a group of Vietnam vets running an impromptu dice game, so the only empty spot was the plastic folding chair next to her at the long communal table. He sighed, set his plate of breaded cod, hushpuppies, and coleslaw down, and slid into the seat. She shifted over to make room, her frayed high-waisted jeans brushing the faded denim of his work pants, and he caught a whiff of coconut shampoo mixed with the tang of fryer grease and the cheap draft beer everyone drank at the post. “Nice to finally meet you, Manny,” she said, holding out a hand, her nails chipped with dark green polish, a tiny scar across her knuckle from a bike accident she’d mention later. “My dad says you fix old arcade games.”
He nodded, shook her hand, her skin softer than he expected, warmer, and pulled his hand back fast, embarrassed at the jolt that ran up his arm. He was old enough to be her dad. That was wrong. He’d spent 8 years intentionally not looking at anyone that wasn’t a sales rep for circuit board parts or a regular customer dropping off a broken cabinet, and the last thing he needed was to make a fool of himself over a kid half his age. He picked up his beer, took a long sip, and grunted a noncommittal reply, staring at his cod like it held the secrets of the universe.
She didn’t take the hint. She passed him the bottle of Texas Pete hot sauce when she saw him scanning the table for it, her forearm brushing his as she set it down, and laughed when he drowned his coleslaw in it. “I do that too,” she said, popping a hushpuppy in her mouth. “Everyone acts like I’m crazy for putting hot sauce on everything, but bland food’s a waste of calories.” He found himself snorting in agreement, and before he knew it, he was talking about the 1981 Pac-Man cabinet he’d dragged out of a barn the week prior, the one with water damage to the control panel and a broken vector monitor he’d spent 12 hours tracking down a replacement part for.
Her eyes lit up. She told him she was studying digital media preservation, specifically retro arcade games, and she’d found his Instagram account for his restoration business a month prior, scrolling through every post he’d ever made, even the blurry ones of him covered in sawdust building new cabinet frames. He’d made that account on a dare from a customer’s teen kid, had 127 followers, half of which were other restoration guys across the country, so he was shocked anyone under 40 cared, let alone a grad student writing her thesis on the exact work he did.
The noise of the VFW faded into the background for him: the clink of beer mugs, the jukebox playing Johnny Cash’s *Folsom Prison Blues*, the yells of the dice game in the corner, all of it faded out as they talked. She leaned in when he described the time he’d won a statewide Pac-Man tournament in 1992, got a $500 prize and a year of free pizza from the local Pizza Hut, and her hand rested on his forearm for two full beats, her thumb brushing the edge of the solder scar he had just above his wrist. He felt his face heat up, and he told himself he was an idiot, that she was just being nice, that there was no way she was actually interested in anything he had to say, but he couldn’t make himself pull his arm away.
She asked him if he’d bring a couple of cabinets to the retro game night her department was hosting on campus the following weekend, said they’d pay him for his time, cover gas, even buy him all the funnel cake he could eat. He almost said no, almost made up an excuse about having too much work to do, but then she tilted her head, the fluorescent lights catching the gold streaks in her dark brown hair, and smiled, the corner of her mouth tugging up in a teasing lopsided grin that made his chest feel tight. “C’mon,” she said. “No one else around here can tell the difference between a Galaga and a Galaxian cabinet. I’m tired of talking to people who think retro gaming means playing Mario Kart on a Switch.”
He said yes before he could talk himself out of it.
When the fish fry wrapped up an hour later, he walked her to her beat up 2012 Honda Civic parked by the entrance, the one with a sticker of a pixelated Donkey Kong on the back window. She pulled a crumpled slip of notebook paper out of her jacket pocket, scribbled her cell number on it, and handed it to him, her thumb brushing his knuckle as he took it. “Text me later and tell me what games you can bring,” she said, unlocking her car door. “And if you want to grab a coffee before that to talk about the Pac-Man cabinet, I’m free all day Sunday.”
He tucked the slip of paper into the breast pocket of his work shirt, where he kept his most frequently used screwdriver and a photo of his 16-year-old niece from her last soccer game, and nodded, watching her pull out of the parking lot before he walked to his own 2007 Ford F-150. He got in, turned the key, and the old truck rumbled to life, a Merle Haggard song playing on the radio he’d had preset for 15 years. He pulled the slip of paper out of his pocket, stared at the messy scrawl of her number for a minute, then unlocked his phone, opened a new text thread, and typed out the first three games he planned to bring.
