Milo Rourke, 57, spends 40 hours a week hunched over the guts of 1980s arcade cabinets, soldering loose wires, replacing faded joystick caps, and talking more to Pac-Man ghosts than he does to other people most weeks. It’s a job he fell into six months after his wife died eight years prior, a way to hold onto the small, silly joys they’d chased together on their first dates at the old mall arcade, and he’s long prided himself on being perfectly content with the quiet. His biggest flaw, if you ask his sister, is that he’ll lie straight to your face about liking being alone, even when he’s clearly starved for someone to laugh at his terrible 80s pop culture jokes.
He’s set up at the neighborhood summer street fair’s beer garden for the afternoon, fixing a beat-up 1982 Donkey Kong machine the fair committee dragged out of a church basement, when she leans over the makeshift plywood barrier next to his workbench. She’s Lila, Karen Carter’s daughter, the woman who was his lab partner senior year of high school, and he’s nodded at her a dozen times over the last four years she’s run the craft beer tent at the fair, but they’ve never exchanged more than a quick “thanks for the IPA” when he grabbed a drink between jobs. It’s 92 degrees out, the air thick with the smell of fried oreos and cut grass, and her linen sundress sticks to the curve of her shoulders, a streak of cherry seltzer dried on her left wrist.
He tells himself he should make an excuse to leave, that this is a bad idea. Lila is 38, for Christ’s sake, he watched her graduate high school, half the people at this fair know both of them, he’d be the butt of every neighborhood barbecue joke for a year if anyone saw them talking like this. But she asks him about the faded Replacements tour tee he’s wearing, says she’s got the same album on vinyl she found at a garage sale last month, and he finds himself rambling about seeing them play in 1987, back when he was still dumb enough to sneak into shows with a fake ID. She stays for 45 minutes, leaning against that barrier, asking him questions about the arcade machines, teasing him when he mutters at a stubborn wire that won’t stay soldered, and he doesn’t even notice when the line at her beer tent backs up until one of her coworkers yells for her.
She leaves, but she brings him a cold cherry seltzer 20 minutes later, sets it down next to his tools, and winks before she walks away. He stares at the can for five minutes before he opens it, his chest tight with a mess of feelings he hasn’t felt in almost a decade: excitement, shame, curiosity, the stupid, giddy feeling that someone is actually paying attention to him, not just the guy who fixes old video games. He keeps glancing over at the beer tent for the rest of the afternoon, catching her looking back every time, and every time she grins, that little crinkle at the corner of her eyes the same as her mom’s, he feels his face heat up again.
The fair wraps up at 8, the sun dipping low over the rooftops, and he’s loading his toolbox into the bed of his beat-up Ford F-150 when the sky opens up, fat raindrops pounding the asphalt so hard it kicks up a cloud of dust that smells like summer and wet concrete. He’s fumbling with the keys to the cab when she runs over, holding a folded beer tent sign over her head, and ducks under the awning over his truck bed, pressing up against his side to stay out of the rain. Her arm is damp from the rain, pressed firm against his bicep, and she tilts her head up to look at him, so close he can feel her breath on his jaw. She kisses him before he can overthink it, soft, the taste of cherry seltzer and mint on her lips, and he doesn’t pull away. He curls one hand around the back of her neck, slow, like he’s scared she’ll vanish if he moves too fast, and kisses her back, the sound of the rain drowning out the rest of the world.
When they pull apart, she’s grinning, her hair stuck to her forehead. “You got a working Donkey Kong at your shop, right?” she says, nodding at the sticker for his business on the back window of the truck. “I’ve been dying to beat a guy who fixes them for a living.” He laughs, unlocking the passenger door, and holds it open for her, rain dripping off the brim of his worn baseball cap onto her forearm. She slides into the seat before he can even make a dumb joke about letting her win.
