Elias Voss, 51, makes his living prying jammed keys out of 100-year-old typewriters, sanding rusted frames, rethreading worn ribbons for retirees writing memoirs and teen poets who think laptops kill creativity. He’s a lifelong people-pleaser, the guy who always volunteers to run the snack stand at Little League games even though he hates kids, who lends his tools to neighbors who never return them, who still texts his ex-wife happy birthday even though she left him for a realtor who drives a Tesla. That’s why he’s stuck manning the fire department raffle table at the annual West Chester block party on a 92-degree July evening, his work boots caked in machine oil he couldn’t scrub off that morning, a frosty can of Pabst sweating through the paper coaster under his elbow.
Lena. His ex-wife’s first cousin, 39, married to a roughneck who’s been working an oil rig off the Gulf of Mexico for six months, mom to a 7-year-old who’s obsessed with dinosaur fossils. They kissed once, last Christmas, in the kitchen of his ex’s mom’s house, after everyone else had passed out on the couch watching *It’s a Wonderful Life*. He’d been drunk on spiked eggnog, she’d been crying because her husband had missed the holiday for the second year in a row, and one minute they were complaining about how insufferable his ex was, the next her hands were in his hair, her cherry lip gloss sticky on his mouth. He’d left 10 minutes later, hadn’t spoken to her since, ignoring her texts, ducking into the grocery store produce aisle when he saw her cart coming down the aisle.
Now she’s leaning against the edge of his raffle table, her shoulder brushing his bicep, wearing cutoff denim shorts and a faded Tom Petty tank top, sun freckles dark across her nose, a cherry snow cone in her hand, syrup dripping down her wrist to her elbow. She smells like coconut sunscreen and cherry Kool-Aid, and when she reaches across the table to grab a stack of raffle tickets, her hand brushes his, her fingers warm and sticky against his cold, beer-sweaty palm. He flinches like he touched a live wire, and she smirks, holding eye contact for three full beats too long, like she knows exactly how flustered she makes him.
“Still hiding from me, Voss?” she says, tilting her head, her hair falling over one shoulder. She licks a drop of syrup off her lower lip before it can drip onto her shirt, and Elias has to look away, staring at the typewriter on the table so he doesn’t do something stupid, like reach across the table and kiss her right there in front of half the town.
He mumbles something about being busy with the raffle, takes a long sip of his beer, his throat tight. He knows this is a bad idea. The whole family would disown them if they found out, the town would talk for months, he still feels guilty about that Christmas kiss, like he betrayed some unspoken rule even though he and his ex have been split for three years. But he can’t stop thinking about how soft her hair felt between his fingers that night, how she laughed when he accidentally knocked a bowl of fudge off the counter mid-kiss.
She leans in closer, her mouth almost touching his ear, so quiet only he can hear her over the band’s wailing guitar. “My kid’s at my mom’s for the night. That old Smith Corona you gave me when I started writing my mystery novel has a stuck ‘e’ key. Could you come take a look at it later?”
Elias’s heart thuds so hard he swears she can hear it. He knows he should say no, tell her he’s busy, go home to his empty house and watch old Westerns and drink beer alone like he does every Saturday night. But when he looks back at her, her pupils are blown wide, her tongue darting out to wet her lips again, and he can’t remember the last time anyone looked at him like that, like he’s the only person in the whole crowded street that matters.
He runs his thumb over the back of her hand, still sticky with cherry syrup, and nods. “8 o’clock,” he says, quiet enough no one else can hear.
She grins, squeezes his wrist once, then turns and walks away, her sneakers slapping against the hot asphalt, the faint scar on the back of her thigh from when she fell off his ATV last summer peeking out from under her shorts. Elias flags down the 16-year-old high school football player who’s been helping out at the raffle table, shoves the box of tickets at him, tells him he can keep whatever cash is left over after the raffle if he mans the table for the rest of the night. The kid’s eyes go wide, nods so fast his baseball cap falls off his head.
Elias grabs his keys off the table, finishes the last of his beer, and walks to his beat-up 2008 Ford F150 parked two blocks over. The leather seats are so hot they burn the back of his thighs through his jeans when he sits down, and he cranks the AC as high as it will go, wiping the sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand. He can still taste cherry syrup on his tongue, from when he wiped his thumb on his lip after touching her hand. He turns the key in the ignition, the truck rumbling to life, and pulls out of the parking spot toward her side of town, no more hesitation.
