Roland Voss, 62, made his living restoring vintage typewriters for collectors across the country, running his whole operation out of the detached garage behind his small lake cottage in western Michigan. For 12 years, he’d avoided every public town event possible, still stinging from the way his ex-wife left him for the local high school football coach, still tired of the sideways pitying looks half the town gave him whenever he dared step foot in the grocery store. His only consistent social interaction was weekly Sunday dinners with his 85-year-old mom, so when she begged him to carry her peach cobbler entry to the annual cherry festival’s baking contest, he couldn’t say no.
He smelled cedar and cherry before he looked down, nothing like the cloying rose perfume his ex had worn every day of their marriage. She laughed, wiping a raindrop off her cheek, and he recognized her immediately: Maren Hale, his ex’s younger sister, the kid who’d been 13 and covered in acne when he married Lila, now 49, back in town for the first time since she left for college in the 90s, her dark hair streaked with silver at the temples, wearing a faded Pearl Jam flannel and cutoff jeans, holding a plastic cup of hard cider in one hand. She’d moved back six months prior after her divorce from a corporate lawyer in Chicago, he’d heard through his mom, but he’d actively avoided running into her until that second.
She called his name, grinning, and he froze for half a second, half convinced she was gonna give him the same awkward pitying smile everyone else did. Instead she leaned in a little, yelling over the sound of rain hammering the plastic tent awning, saying she’d heard he fixed typewriters now, that she had their dad’s old 1947 Smith Corona sitting in her guest room closet, broken for 20 years, she’d been meaning to reach out. He nodded, his throat a little tight, still hyper aware of how close she was standing, her elbow brushing his every time someone squeezed past them through the crowd.
He told her about the time a customer shipped him a typewriter full of 40-year-old marijuana seeds tucked under the key caps, and she laughed so hard she snort-laughed, her hand landing on his forearm for three full seconds, her palm warm through the thin wet fabric of his shirt. He felt the heat of that touch linger long after she pulled her hand away, even as a group of teen boys ran past, splashing puddle water all over his scuffed work boots. She told him about her job as a freelance graphic designer, how she worked remote now, how she’d bought the little blue cottage three blocks from his, how Lila was living in Florida with the coach now, retired, no one in town even talked about their old split anymore.
He’d spent 12 years convinced everyone in town still saw him as the schmuck who got left for the guy who won three state championships, and the realization that no one cared hit him like a punch to the chest, warm and disorienting. When she leaned in again to avoid a server carrying a tray of frosty beer mugs, her hair brushing his jaw, she asked him if he wanted to head back to her place to look at the typewriter, said she had a bottle of bourbon their dad had stashed in the basement back in 1985, unopened. He hesitated for half a second, the old, familiar shame flaring up, the voice in his head saying it was wrong, that people would talk, that she was his ex’s sister, for Christ’s sake.
Then she tilted her head, brushing a wet strand of hair off her face, her thumb accidentally brushing his wrist as she moved her hand, and all that noise in his head went quiet. He nodded. She pulled a beat-up plaid umbrella out of her canvas tote bag, popping it open, and they slipped out the back of the tent, away from the crowd, no one even glancing their way. His arm wrapped around her waist to keep her from slipping on the wet sidewalk, the empty cobbler dish clinking softly against his leg where he held it in his other hand, the heat of her side seeping through his wet shirt, the worn denim of her jeans soft under his palm. When she paused to point out a stray orange cat huddled under a porch rail, he tucked her a little closer under the umbrella, the cold rain on his neck no longer registering at all.
