Elias Voss, 53, makes his living restoring vintage typewriters out of a cinder block garage tucked behind a laundromat in West Asheville. He only takes cash, doesn’t have a website, and hasn’t attended a single community event since his ex-wife left him for a timeshare salesman seven years prior. His little sister all but dragged him to the fire department’s annual chili cookoff that Saturday, saying if he spent one more night alone drinking bourbon and talking to half-fixed Royal models she’d change the locks on his shop. He’d agreed only because she’d threatened to donate his collection of 1930s Underwoods to the high school drama department.
He was standing off to the far edge of the parking lot, picking at a bowl of chili so spicy it made his eyes water, when someone’s elbow caught the small of his back hard enough to make him slosh a spoonful of meat sauce down the front of his gray flannel. He turned around ready to snap, and found Mara Carter grinning up at him, a seltzer can sweating in her hand, a streak of charcoal gray cutting through the dark curls pulled back from her face. She was his ex-wife’s younger cousin, the one who’d crashed on their couch for three months when she was 22, fresh out of college, running from a bad boyfriend in Portland. Back then, he’d gone out of his way to avoid being alone with her, had scolded himself more than once for letting his eyes linger on her bare legs when she’d walk to the kitchen for coffee at 2 a.m. Guilt coiled tight in his chest the second he recognized her, half shame for the old thoughts, half surprise that she was even in town.
Her cold, calloused fingers wrapped around his bicep to steady him, the rough pad of her index finger (calloused, he noticed, from tying hundreds of herb bundles for the apothecary she ran now) brushing the exposed skin at his cuff. “Whoa, sorry about that,” she said, and she didn’t let go right away, held eye contact so long he felt the tips of his ears go pink. “I thought you’d be holed up in that garage of yours, pretending the rest of the world doesn’t exist. My cousin said you’d turned into a total hermit.”
He grunted, swiped at the chili stain on his shirt with a crumpled napkin, and tried not to think about the fact that his ex-wife still talked about him to her. He’d spent seven years deliberately avoiding every person who’d been in their shared orbit, convinced they all thought he was the one who’d messed up the marriage. Mara didn’t seem to care, though, she leaned against the side of the fire truck next to him, and didn’t move when their shoulders brushed. The air smelled like chili powder and pine, the bluegrass band playing near the picnic tables was fumbling through a cover of a Johnny Cash song he’d liked in college, and she was telling him about the apothecary, about the custom tea blends she made for veterans with insomnia, and he found himself leaning in, actually listening, instead of planning his escape.
She laughed at a dumb joke he made about the chili being spicy enough to strip paint off a truck, and reached up to wipe a smudge of tomato sauce off his cheek before she even thought about it. Her fingers were still cold, and he froze for half a second, the old guilt warring with the hot, tight spark he felt low in his stomach, the kind he hadn’t felt since he was 20 years old. He knew it was wrong, on some level, to want his ex-wife’s cousin, had spent years shoving that thought down so far he’d almost forgotten it existed, but standing there next to her, the hum of the crowd in the background, he couldn’t make himself care about the unspoken rules he’d been following for a decade.
“I had a crush on you back then, you know,” she said, quiet enough that only he could hear it, and she didn’t look away when he stared at her, shocked. “You were the only grown up I knew who didn’t act like his job was a death sentence. You’d sit at the dining room table for hours fixing those typewriters, humming to yourself, and I thought you were the coolest person I’d ever met. I thought you never even noticed me.”
“I noticed you,” he said, before he could stop himself, and her smile softened, something warm and bright in her eyes that he hadn’t seen in anyone else in years. She shifted closer, her hip pressed against his, and he could smell mint and cinnamon on her breath, could feel the heat coming off her through her flannel shirt. “I avoided you because I didn’t trust myself to not say something stupid. Back when I was still married. I thought it was wrong.”
“The line’s been gone for seven years, Elias,” she said, and she slipped her hand into his, her fingers lacing through his, her palm cold against his sweaty one. “You can stop beating yourself up over it.”
He didn’t hesitate when he asked her if she wanted to come back to his shop, told her he had a bottle of small batch bourbon he’d been saving for no good reason, and a 1952 Royal he’d just finished restoring that typed in green ink. She nodded, squeezed his hand, and they walked past the crowd, no one glancing their way, no one caring who they were or where they were going. He held the door of his beat up Ford pickup open for her, and when she climbed in, she brushed her lips against his cheek, quick and soft, before she pulled her seatbelt on.
