Elias Voss, 52, makes his living restoring vintage typewriters, a job that rewards meticulousness and zero spontaneous social commitments. For seven years, ever since his ex-wife packed up and left for a life in Portland with a guy who sold artisanal hot sauce, he’s stuck to a rigid schedule: up at 6, coffee black, 8 hours in his cinder block workshop behind his house, frozen meatloaf or lasagna for dinner at 7, bed by 10. He only agreed to come to the town’s summer beer garden pop-up because his next door neighbor wouldn’t stop pestering him about “getting some sun for once” and threatening to drop off her annoying golden retriever at his shop every day for a week if he bailed.
The humidity clings to the graying hair on his forearms, the bitter tang of hazy IPA he didn’t even want coating his tongue as he leans against a splintered picnic table, half listening to the bluegrass band wail on the small wooden stage. He’s mentally cataloging the replacement parts he needs for a 1952 Royal Quiet De Luxe a client dropped off earlier that week when he spots her. Clara, his new tenant, the woman who rents the tiny 1920s cottage behind his workshop, the one he’s exchanged exactly nine awkward, polite words with in the three months she’s lived there. He’d avoided her on purpose, convinced any casual conversation with a tenant would turn into a complaint about a leaky faucet or a rent extension he couldn’t afford to grant, and he hated messy, unplanned conflict more than anything.
She waves, weaving through the crowd of laughing families and retirees in lawn chairs, loose linen sundress fluttering around her calves, a can of lemon seltzer in one hand. When she stops next to him, the toe of her scuffed leather sandal brushes the scuffed toe of his worn work boot, and he can smell lavender from her shampoo and the faint, sweet tang of the strawberry popsicle she’d been eating earlier sticky on her fingers. She leans in to talk over the band, her bare shoulder pressing warm against the rolled-up sleeve of his faded navy flannel, and he fights the urge to jerk away like he’s been burned. “I didn’t think I’d see you here,” she says, grinning, the corners of her eyes crinkling, silver streaks catching the golden sun in her wavy auburn hair. “Figured you’d be locked in that shop of yours, covered in typewriter oil.”
He fumbles for a response, his throat suddenly dry. He’s spent so long talking only to clients who ramble on about their grandmother’s old typewriters or their high school poetry projects that small talk with someone his age feels like a foreign language. He knocks his beer can off the edge of the table by accident, and she reaches out to catch it before it spills all over a toddler’s stroller passing by, her fingers brushing his when she passes it back. The jolt goes all the way up his arm, to the base of his spine. He’s equal parts horrified and giddy—horrified because she’s his tenant, crossing that line is stupid, unprofessional, the kind of messy mistake he hasn’t made in decades, and giddy because no one’s touched him that casually, that intentionally, in longer than he can remember.
She asks if he wants to split a warm soft pretzel with cheddar cheese dip, says the stand at the front makes the best ones within 30 miles, salty enough to cut through the beer buzz. He should say no. He should make an excuse about having to get home to fix a broken spring he left halfway done, keep the sharp boundary he’s worked so hard to build between his work and his personal life. Instead, he nods. They carry the pretzel to a picnic table tucked under a gnarled old oak tree, far enough away from the crowd that they don’t have to yell to hear each other. She tells him she found a beat-up Underwood No. 5 in the library’s attic earlier that week, where she works as a circulation clerk, and she was going to knock on his door this weekend to ask if he’d look at it, maybe trade for a few months of free yard work and all the peach pie she can bake. He’s so busy staring at the smattering of freckles across her nose that he almost misses the question.
When he doesn’t answer right away, she leans forward, her knee brushing his under the table, and holds his eye contact steady, no teasing, no hesitation. “I know you think tenant-landlord stuff is off limits,” she says, soft enough that no one else can hear, and runs her thumb along the faded scar on his knuckle, the one he got when a rusted typewriter spring snapped on him last winter. “I’ve waited three months for you to stop hiding behind those old machines long enough to notice I’m interested. You don’t have to be scared of messing up a routine that’s been making you miserable for years.”
The words hit him like a gentle punch to the chest. He’d thought he was hiding how bored he was, how hollow the quiet of his house felt after the workshop lights go out every night. For half a second, his old cautious self screams that this is a terrible idea, that it’ll end with her moving out and him being even lonelier than before, that he should stick to what he knows. Then she laces her fingers through his, her palm warm and calloused from shelving library books, and all that resistance melts like butter on a hot griddle.
He tells her he’ll look at the Underwood tomorrow, right after they get blueberry pancakes at the diner on Main Street, the one with the homemade syrup he’s been sneaking to go once a month for years. She grins, squeezing his hand, as the sun dips below the tree line, painting the sky streaks of tangerine and soft rose, the band switching to a slow, waltzing tune that drifts through the oak leaves overhead. He doesn’t even remember why he ever thought staying home alone every night was a better plan.
