Roland “Roly” Hargrove, 63, has made a career out of fixing things people wrote off as broken. The retired forensic accountant traded spreadsheets for typewriter springs eight years prior, right after his wife Linda lost her three year fight with ovarian cancer. He’d packed up their Atlanta home, moved to a creaky 1920s cottage outside Asheville, turned his two-car garage into a repair shop, and deliberately walled himself off from anything that felt like a new connection. His only consistent foray into the world was the monthly downtown beer pop-up, where he sold a handful of restored typewriters each month, mostly because his college roommate who owned the host brewery guilt-tripped him into showing up.
The September air that evening smelled like crushed maple leaves, hop resin, and roasted candied almonds from the food cart two booths down. Bluegrass hummed from the stage at the end of the brick-paved street, kids ran past with sticky cotton candy hands, and Roly had already picked a loose thread on his flannel shirt so raw his thumb was sore. He was five minutes from packing up early when Maeve walked up.
He recognized her immediately, even though he hadn’t seen her since Linda’s funeral, when she was 40 and fresh out of carpentry school. Now 48, she had a tattoo of a typewriter ‘L’ key peeking out from the cuff of her work shirt, scraped knuckles, and a half-empty cup of spiced hard cider in one hand. She stopped a foot from his table, leaned in at the waist to get a closer look at the 1956 Royal Quiet De Luxe he’d finished restoring the night before, and her shoulder brushed his bicep when she reached out to tap the space bar. He froze, the scent of jasmine lotion under cedar sawdust and cinnamon curling into his nose, the first time he’d been that close to a woman who wasn’t a random customer in almost a decade.
She held his eye contact for three full beats before grinning, the same crooked smile Linda used to get when she was about to tease him. “You still have that same grumpy scowl. I’d know that face anywhere.”
He stumbled over his greeting at first, half flustered, half guilty for the jolt he’d felt when she touched him. She was Linda’s baby cousin, for Christ’s sake, the kid who used to crash their Thanksgivings when she was in college, who Linda used to gush about every chance she got. He tried to keep the conversation professional when she said she was in town for a three-month bungalow renovation gig, that she’d found her mom’s old Underwood No. 5 in her attic and looked him up specifically to fix it, but she kept steering the conversation back to old memories: the terrible boxed mac and cheese he used to make for holiday dinners, the way Linda used to hide his typewriter parts when he spent too much time in the shop instead of watching rom-coms with her, how Linda had told her once that if Roly ever closed himself off after she was gone, Maeve had permission to kick his ass.
The guilt twisted sharper in his chest, warring with a warm, fizzing excitement he’d forgotten existed. He kept telling himself he should send her away, that this was wrong, that even entertaining a conversation with her that didn’t revolve around typewriter repairs was a betrayal of the 32 years he’d had with Linda. But he couldn’t make himself cut her off. He liked the rough, loud sound of her laugh, the way she ran her calloused fingers over the typewriter keys like she knew exactly how much care went into fixing them, the way she didn’t tiptoe around mentioning Linda like everyone else in his life did now.
The sky opened up out of nowhere, fat cold raindrops slamming into the brick hard enough to kick up dust, and the entire pop-up dissolved into chaos. Roly fumbled with the blue tarp he kept under his table, his hands shaking too hard to get a grip on the grommets, until Maeve grabbed the other end of the tarp and helped him yank it over the stack of typewriters. They were both soaked through in 30 seconds, her Johnny Cash tee sticking to her shoulders, raindrops running down the side of her face, when she leaned in close enough that her breath brushed his ear, loud enough to be heard over the rain and the yelling from other vendors. “My Airbnb is 20 minutes away and I don’t feel like driving soaked. You got space at your place for me to dry off? And Linda told me about the bottle of bourbon you keep stashed on the porch for special occasions.”
He hesitated for half a second, his mind flashing to the photo of Linda on his fridge, the way she’d held his hand in her hospital bed and made him promise he wouldn’t spend the rest of his life alone, that he deserved to be happy even when she wasn’t there. He nodded, water dripping off the brim of his baseball cap onto his jacket. “I got a spare bedroom. Bourbon’s already out.”
They loaded the typewriters into the bed of his beat-up 2004 Ford F150 in record time, and she climbed into the passenger seat, twisting the knob on his old factory radio until Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues” blared out of the crackling speakers. She sang along off key, tapping her scuffed work boot against the dashboard, and when she caught him looking over at her, she winked. When she reached over to rest her warm, calloused hand on his forearm as he turned onto the dirt road leading to his cottage, he didn’t pull away.
