Rafe Mendez, 53, makes his living prying jammed keys off 70 year old typewriters and replacing worn ink ribbons, and he’s spent the last seven years structuring every day so tightly there’s no room for surprise. He left Charlotte after his divorce, bought a converted garage on Main Street in the tiny Blue Ridge mountain town he’d visited once on a fishing trip, and only breaks his work routine twice a week: Wednesdays for grocery runs, Fridays for the volunteer fire department BBQ. He avoids small talk like it’s a rusted typewriter with missing parts, and he’s gone out of his way to avoid Lila Marlow for the three months she’s lived in town. She’s his ex-wife’s cousin, for one. He’d only met her once, at his wedding 22 years prior, when she was 26 and caught the bouquet and winked at him across the reception hall like she knew something he didn’t.
The BBQ is sweltering the Friday she corners him. It’s 82 degrees, humidity so thick it coats his throat when he breathes, and there’s grease caked under his fingernails from fixing a 1952 Royal that morning for a college student writing her thesis on mid-century Southern poetry. He’s sitting alone on the end of a splintered pine picnic bench, picking at a burnt hamburger, when she drops down next to him so close her denim-clad knee brushes his. He freezes. She’s holding two frosted cans of hard peach iced tea, one of which she presses to his bare forearm, cold enough to make him flinch. She smells like lavender laundry detergent and old paper, the kind you find tucked in the back of a library shelf, and her mint green nail polish is chipped at the edges, same as it was that day at the wedding.
He’s immediately furious at himself for noticing. His ex would throw a fit if she knew they were even sitting next to each other, and he’s spent seven years actively avoiding any situation that could be misconstrued as drama. He opens his mouth to make an excuse to leave, but she holds up a hand, and the scar on her left wrist, from the horse riding accident she’d rambled to him about for ten minutes at that 2001 wedding, catches the sun. “I’m not here to cause trouble,” she says, grinning, and her voice is lower than he remembers, a little rough, like she’s spent the last week yelling over heavy metal while she unpacked boxes. “I found a box of typewritten poetry in the attic of the bookstore I just took over, and the old Underwood it was typed on is jammed so bad I can’t even press a single key. The fire chief said you’re the only guy within 40 miles who knows how to fix those things.”
He should say he’s swamped. He has six typewriters waiting for repair, a batch of pecan pie he needs to bake for the fire department’s bake sale over the weekend, and a rule about not mixing work with people who are connected to his old life. But she’s leaning in when he talks, like she actually cares when he rambles about how Underwoods from the 40s have notoriously finicky key bars, and her knee stays pressed to his the whole time, warm through the thin denim of both their jeans. Every few seconds she laughs at one of his dry, deadpan jokes, the kind most people roll their eyes at, and he finds himself leaning in too, close enough that he can taste the peach iced tea on her breath when she speaks.
When the sun starts to dip below the tree line, she stands, wiping grass off the back of her jeans, and asks him if he wants to walk back to the bookstore with her to look at the typewriter. He hesitates for half a second, then nods, shoving his half-eaten hamburger in the trash can next to the bench. The walk is three blocks long, the sidewalk cracked and dotted with dandelions, and their hands brush twice when they step around a group of kids chasing a golden retriever down the street. The third time, she laces her fingers through his, her palm soft from decades of turning book pages, his rough from sanding down rusted typewriter parts, and he doesn’t pull away.
The bookstore is dim when they get there, the windows lined with shelves of used fiction, the air thick with the smell of leather bindings and vanilla candles. She locks the front door behind them, turns to face him, and kisses him slow, no urgency, like she’s been waiting to do it for 22 years. He kisses her back, his hands coming to rest on her hips, and for the first time in seven years he doesn’t overthink it. He doesn’t think about his ex, or the town gossips who will definitely see them walking to the diner together in the morning, or the stack of typewriters waiting for him back at his shop.
They spend two hours going through the box of poetry, pausing every few minutes to kiss, leaning against the back counter while rain starts to tap against the front windows. The Underwood is tucked under a table in the back corner, just a little rusted, only needing a new ribbon and a few drops of oil on the key bars. He tells her he’ll fix it for free, as long as she lets him take her out for pancakes at the Main Street diner the next morning. She laughs, swatting playfully at his chest, and says only if he brings her a slice of the pecan pie the fire guys won’t stop raving about. He nods, pulling her close to kiss her again, the soft jingle of the bell above the locked front door ringing faint when a gust of wind pushes against the frame.
