Javier Mendez, 52, makes his living rebuilding vintage typewriters out of a clapboard shop on the edge of Silverton, Oregon, and he’d rather spend 12 hours prying a rusted shift key free from a 1940s Underwood than drag himself to the town’s annual peach festival. He only showed up because his old high school buddy owed him a hundred bucks for fixing a typewriter he planned to give his granddaughter, and the guy swore he’d hand over the cash plus a cold IPA by the cobbler food truck. The August air sticks to his forearms like damp cotton, bluegrass bleeds from the main stage two blocks over, and he’s already mentally compiling his to-do list for the next day when he turns too fast to dodge a group of teens carrying giant snow cones.
His elbow connects with a paper plate holding a half-eaten cobbler sample, and it clatters to the asphalt, peach glaze splattering the white canvas sneakers of the woman standing next to him. He knows who she is immediately: Clara Bennett, 48, the county librarian who’d banned his three favorite 1970s pulp westerns from the adult section six months prior, the same woman who’d left a passive aggressive note on his shop door last spring complaining about the noise from his sandblaster at 7PM. He’s held a petty grudge ever since, has a running joke with his regulars about her being the town’s official fun police. He opens his mouth to apologize, already bracing for a sharp lecture, when she snorts loud, swiping a streak of peach glaze off her wrist with her thumb and licking it off.
They both bend at the same time to grab the crumpled napkin under her feet, and the top of his head knocks gently against hers, hard enough to make her glasses slip down her nose. He grabs her elbow to steady her before she can tip over, and his palm meets the cool, soft skin of her forearm, dotted with faint freckles, the scent of lavender hand cream and ripe peaches wrapping around him so fast it makes his chest feel tight. He buys her a fresh cobbler sample and a lemonade from the truck, and when he hands them to her their fingers brush; he notices her thumb is smudged with deep blue ink, the exact same shade he uses to stamp the warranty tags on the typewriters he sells. She catches him staring and wiggles her thumb, grinning. “Stamp pads for the summer reading program. I go through three a month.”
They end up perched on a splintered pine picnic bench set back from the crowd, out of the way of the parade of families and dog walkers. She teases him first, pointing out the faded pulp western patch sewn onto the breast of his work flannel, and he bites back that he’s still mad about the book ban. She laughs so hard she snorts again, leaning forward so her shoulder brushes his bicep, and explains she pulled the tattered, falling apart copies because she’d been tracking down mint first editions to replace them, has a whole stack of them in her office waiting to be cataloged. She admits she’s stopped by his shop twice in the last three months to drop off a crate of old typewriters the library was throwing out, but he was always hunched over his work bench with noise cancelling headphones on, so she didn’t want to bother him. He feels his face heat up, suddenly embarrassed by all the petty jokes he’s made about her, all the times he’d rolled his eyes when he saw her at the grocery store.
A group of kids chasing a golden retriever comes barrelling around the corner of the food truck, and one of them slams into her back, shoving her right into his chest. She doesn’t scramble away immediately, just looks up at him, her hazel eyes flecked with gold, glasses still a little askew, peach juice glistening on her lower lip. He brushes a strand of dark, gray-streaked hair off her forehead, his knuckles grazing her cheek, and she leans into the touch, slow, like she’s making sure it’s not an accident. He tells her he has a first edition of *The Hardest Ride* in his shop, one of the pulps she’s been looking for, plus a pitcher of honey iced tea in his mini fridge that’s way better than the lemonade from the food truck, asks if she wants to come see it.
She nods before he finishes talking, wiping the last of the cobbler crumbs off her jeans, and tucks her hand into the crook of his elbow as they walk away from the fair, the sound of the bluegrass band fading behind them as they turn down the tree-shaded side street leading to his shop. When they pass the dented 1930s Royal he propped in his front yard as a permanent porch sign, she taps the raised metal ‘J’ key twice, slow, like she’s testing out a secret.
