Elias Voss, 52, has made a career out of fixing things people abandoned. Vintage typewriters, mostly—Royal Quiet De Luxes, old Smith Coronas, the occasional beat-up Underwood that a college kid dragged out of a grandparent’s attic. He’s got a scar snaking up his left forearm from a slipped screwdriver last winter, and a habit of bailing on social events before anyone can ask him too many personal questions. His part-time employee, a skater kid named Javi, all but dragged him to the neighborhood block party that Saturday, saying he’d spent three straight weekends holed up in his shop gluing rubber platen feet and deserved to drink a beer that wasn’t warm from sitting on his workbench. Elias had agreed only because Javi threatened to hide all his new ribbon stock if he said no. He’s leaning against a splintered oak picnic table 10 minutes in, already mentally mapping his exit route, when he sees her.
She’s standing by the grill, holding a paper plate piled with potato salad, laughing at something the guy running the brat stand said. He recognizes her immediately—Maren, 48, the woman who moved into the blue cottage two doors down from his bungalow two weeks prior, the one who’d waved at him through his truck window when he was hauling a load of typewriters back from an estate sale. He’d recognized her last name right away, too; she’d been married to his cousin Rick for 12 years, until Rick got caught cheating on her with his dental hygienist and she filed for divorce faster than he could lie his way out of it. Rick had spent the last decade complaining about her to anyone who’d listen, calling her too stubborn, too picky, too unwilling to put up with his crap. Elias had never believed a word of it. Rick was the kind of guy who’d steal beer out of your cooler at a cookout and then lie about it, after all.
She spots him before he can duck behind the ice chest. She grins, wiping a smudge of mustard off the corner of her mouth with the back of her hand, and walks over. The citronella torches lining the sidewalk cast gold over her sun-streaked brown hair, and her yellow linen sundress swishes around her calves when she moves. “Elias, right?” she says, stopping so close he can smell coconut sunscreen and the sharp, sweet tang of the lemonade in her plastic cup. “Rick mentioned you ran the typewriter shop downtown a few times. I walked past it earlier this week with my beagle, Muffin. She tried to pee on your storefront sign.” He snorts before he can stop himself, the tension in his shoulders loosening a little. When she laughs, her elbow brushes his bicep, warm through the thin cotton of his gray work shirt, and he has to fight not to lean into the touch. They talk for 20 minutes, first about the terrible cover band playing 90s country covers so off-key even the drunk college kids are wincing, then about her beagle’s obsession with stealing socks off laundry lines, then about the 1954 Royal he’d just finished restoring for a local poet. He forgets all about his exit plan.
A twinge of guilt hits him halfway through a story about a customer who tried to bring in a typewriter that had been chewed up by a bear. He’s not supposed to be talking to her, right? Unspoken family rules, even if Rick hasn’t spoken to him in three years over a fight about a vintage 1972 Ford pickup they’d both wanted at an auction. The desire warring with that guilt is sharper, warmer, though—he can’t remember the last time a woman looked at him like she’s actually listening to what he’s saying, not just waiting for him to stop talking so she can ask for a discount on a repair. When the band cranks up the volume for an even worse rendition of “Friends in Low Places”, she leans in even closer, her lips almost brushing his ear, and says she can’t hear a damn thing he’s saying. “Wanna walk down to the waterfront?” she asks. “It’s quieter down there, and the sunset’s supposed to be good tonight.”
He hesitates for half a second, images of Rick yelling at him over a family Thanksgiving table flashing through his head. Then he looks at her, at the faint smattering of freckles across her nose, at the way she’s twisting the thin silver ring on her index finger like she’s nervous he’ll say no, and he nods. They walk past the group of screaming kids chasing each other with water guns, past the old lady selling homemade peach jams out of a folding table, down the potholed side street that leads to the Willamette River path. The sidewalk is cracked and uneven, and she trips over a raised slab of concrete half a block in, lurching forward. He grabs her wrist without thinking to steady her, his calloused fingers wrapping around the soft skin of her arm, and their eyes lock for a beat longer than necessary. She doesn’t pull away. “Rick doesn’t get to decide who I hang out with, for the record,” she says, like she can read the guilt still lingering in the back of his head. “He hasn’t gotten a say in anything I do since I found his second phone hidden in the back of his tool chest.”
They make it to the waterfront a minute later, the pink and orange streaks of the sunset painting the water like someone spilled a watercolor palette across the sky. There’s a weathered cedar bench half-hidden under a cluster of sugar maple trees, and she sits down, patting the spot next to her. He sits, his leg brushing hers through the fabric of their clothes, and for a few minutes they don’t say anything, just watch a group of kayakers paddle past, their bright neon boats bobbing in the gentle current. She rests her hand on his knee first, light, like she’s testing the waters, then laces her fingers through his when he doesn’t pull away. He can feel the callus on her middle finger from the watercolor paints she’d mentioned using earlier, and for the first time in seven years, he doesn’t feel the urge to rush home to an empty house.
