Moe Sorrentino, 57, makes his living restoring vintage pinball machines out of a converted two-car garage in southeast Portland, and he hasn’t willingly attended a neighborhood block party in three years. The last one he went to, a well-meaning local librarian had cornered him for 20 minutes listing off widows in the area who “loved old games too,” and he’d left so flustered he’d forgotten the 1972 Centipede cabinet he’d hauled there for the kids’ booth. He only showed up this time because 12-year-old Javi from three houses down had banged on his shop door at 8 a.m. begging him to bring the freshly restored 1978 Space Invaders pinball he’d been working on for months, and Moe can never say no to that kid.
He’s leaning against an oak tree sipping a lukewarm Pabst, half watching kids cluster around the pinball machine cheering when someone hits the high score, when he turns to grab a napkin off the folding table behind him and slams shoulder-first into someone warm. He’s already halfway through a gruff apology when he looks down and sees her grinning up at him, no trace of annoyance on her face. She’s wearing a loose linen button-down rolled to the elbows, jeans cuffed at the ankle, bare feet in scuffed leather sandals, and she smells like clary sage and raw wild honey. The name tag pinned to her shirt says Lila, and she says she moved into the blue bungalow next to his two weeks prior, left a jar of her home-harvested honey on his porch three days ago but he never came to the door. Moe flushes, remembers he’d been hunched over a fried circuit board for 11 hours straight that day, didn’t hear anything over the podcast he was blaring about 1960s pinball manufacturing flaws. He mumbles an apology, says he doesn’t get many visitors, usually doesn’t check the porch unless he’s expecting a parts shipment.
She doesn’t let him escape like he’s expecting. She leans in a little, tilts her head toward the Space Invaders machine, and says she hasn’t seen one that mint since she was a teen hanging around her dad’s bowling alley in upstate New York. Moe finds himself talking before he can stop himself, explaining the custom LED backlights he installed that don’t fade the original art, the vintage flipper springs he sourced from a retired parts dealer in Cleveland, how he spent three weeks sanding and re-staining the cabinet to get rid of the water damage it got sitting in a barn for 20 years. She listens, doesn’t interrupt, nods along like she actually cares about the difference between 1970s and 1980s pinball solenoids. When she leans in closer to ask how he fixes stuck drop targets, her forearm brushes his, and he can feel the faint, raised scar along her wrist from a childhood bike crash she offhandedly mentions a minute later. She holds eye contact when she talks, doesn’t look away when he catches her staring at the grease smudge on his jaw, and for the first time in years, Moe doesn’t feel the urge to wipe it off self-consciously.
He’s been alone since his wife died of ovarian cancer 8 years prior, and he’s spent most of that time deliberately keeping people at arm’s length. Dating at his age feels like a stupid, juvenile game, and most people who find out he’s widowed either give him that pitying, sad-eyed look he hates or try to set him up with their cousin or their coworker, no questions asked. Lila doesn’t do either of those things. She teases him for wearing steel-toe boots to a block party, offers him a homemade lavender lemon cookie from the tray she’s holding, and laughs so hard at the story he tells about Javi dropping a 50-pound pinball playfield on his foot last month that she snorts a little, then claps a hand over her mouth like she’s embarrassed. He likes that. Likes that she doesn’t act like every interaction has to be perfect, like she’s not performing anything for him.
The first firework goes off right then, bright crimson, painting the whole street pink for a split second, and Lila flinches, steps closer to him without thinking, her hip pressed firm to his for three full seconds before she moves back, muttering a sheepish apology. He says it’s fine, he doesn’t mind, and he means it. They both reach down at the same time to grab the neon green glow stick that rolled off the table between their feet, and their fingers lace together for a beat, warm and calloused on both ends, before Moe picks it up and hands it to her. He admits he doesn’t usually do this, hang around public events, talk to people he doesn’t know, that he’s spent the last three years making up excuses to skip every neighborhood gathering he’s invited to. She smirks, tucks a strand of dark hair behind her ear, and says she noticed, watched him stand in the same spot by the tree for 45 minutes, staring at his shoes every time someone tried to strike up a conversation with him. He laughs, loud and genuine, the first time he’s laughed that hard around someone who isn’t Javi or one of his regular customers in years.
The last of the fireworks fades to smoke against the dark sky, and people start packing up coolers, herding sleepy, sticky kids to their cars, folding up folding tables. Moe wipes his palms on the leg of his work jeans, asks her if she wants to come back to his shop with him. He says he’s got a cooler of cold root beer in the fridge, and the half-restored 1964 Addams Family pinball machine he’s been working on is set up by the workbench, no quarters needed if she wants to test it out. She grins, tucks the glow stick behind her ear so it glows neon green against her dark hair, and says she’d like that a lot. He hoists the dolly he brought to haul the Space Invaders machine home onto his shoulder, and brushes a stray fleck of firework ash off the collar of her linen shirt with his free hand, his thumb brushing the soft, warm skin of her collarbone for half a second before he nods toward the row of houses, already turning to lead the way.
