Elias Voss, 52, makes his living restoring antique typewriters out of a cinder block garage turned workshop in the hills outside Asheville, North Carolina. He’s lived there eight years, ever since his wife packed their Honda Civic and left for a software sales job in Austin, and he’s cultivated a very specific, very uncomplicated routine: wake at 6 a.m. to black coffee and a slice of toast, work on four machines max per day, eat a frozen meatloaf dinner most nights, and hit the VFW fish fry every Friday without fail, if only to avoid eating alone while watching old Westerns on his 12-inch TV. His biggest flaw, by his own admission, is that he’s made himself deliberately unapproachable to anyone who seems like they might want to get closer than a chat about carburetor rebuilds or the merits of mid-century Royal typewriters. He’s got no patience for the small town gossip mill, which has spent the last three months trying to set him up with the new county librarian.
He almost bailed on the fish fry that late May afternoon when he saw her beat-up Subaru Outback parked in the VFW lot. He knew she was there to pick up a box of donated veteran memoirs the post had been collecting, knew half the old guys there were already plotting to push them into the same picnic table. He stayed anyway, mostly because the fry cook made the best catfish west of Charlotte, and he wasn’t about to let a meddling group of 70-year-old Army vets ruin his favorite meal of the week.
She was standing on the edge of the porch when he walked up, holding a paper plate heaped with fried catfish and coleslaw, one sandal caught on a loose floorboard. She stumbled forward before she could catch herself, and Elias reacted before he thought, reaching out to wrap his calloused, ink-stained hand around her elbow to steady her. Her free hand flew out to brace herself, palm flat against the faded denim of his work shirt, and he caught a whiff of lavender hand lotion and old paper, sharp and sweet and nothing like the heavy perfume his ex used to douse herself in. She held his eye contact for three full beats longer than polite, a half-smirk tugging at the corner of her mouth, before she righted herself and brushed crumbs off her jeans. “Faster than you look, hunched over all those rusted machines all day,” she said, and he blinked, surprised she even knew what he did for work.
All the other picnic tables were full by the time they got their sweet teas, so they sat down across from each other at the only empty spot, tucked in the corner of the porch out of the wind. He learned her name was Mara, she was 48, she’d moved to the area six months prior from Pittsburgh, and she restored old leather book bindings in her spare time. She admitted she’d had a beat-up 1927 Underwood sitting in her guest room for three months, too nervous to bring it by his shop because everyone in town kept telling her he was a hermit who bit the head off anyone who interrupted his work. He laughed, a rough, rusty sound he didn’t make often, and told her the gossip mill also told him she was the one who banned the local Baptist pastor’s favorite explicit romance novel from the library stacks, and she snort-laughed so hard coleslaw almost came out of her nose. She said the pastor was the one checking the book out every other week, so she figured he could handle the ban if he was that desperate for a copy of his own.
Their knees brushed under the table when a group of local kids ran past, chasing a golden retriever with a hush puppy in its mouth, and neither of them moved away. The denim of her jeans was soft against his, warm from the sun, and he found himself leaning forward across the table without meaning to, like he was trying to catch every word she said over the noise of the crowd. She reached across the table halfway through their meal to pluck a hush puppy off his plate, her fingers brushing his when she grabbed it, and he felt a jolt go up his arm that he hadn’t felt in well over a decade, sharp and warm and not unwelcome. She had a streak of silver in her chestnut hair, right at her temple, and a smudge of tartar sauce on her left cheek, and he didn’t point it out, just watched her talk, the way her hands moved when she described repairing a 100-year-old copy of *To Kill a Mockingbird* that had been chewed by a dog.
When the crowd started to thin out, the sun dipping low enough to paint the hills pink and orange, she wiped her hands on a napkin and looked him dead in the eye. “I’ve got that Underwood at my place, and a bottle of 12-year-old bourbon my brother sent me from Kentucky,” she said, no coyness, no beating around the bush. “No pressure to fix it tonight. Or ever. But if you want to come over, you can.” He hesitated for half a second, the voice in the back of his head screaming that he was setting himself up for disappointment, that this was just another thing that would leave, that he was better off going home to his frozen dinner and his Westerns. Then he looked at her, the way she was biting the corner of her lip like she was half-nervous he’d say no, and he nodded before he could overthink it.
Her place was two blocks from the VFW, a small blue clapboard cottage with rhododendron bushes blooming along the walkway, the air thick with their sweet, heady scent. Halfway down the block, she reached over and laced her fingers through his, her palm soft against his calloused one, and he didn’t pull away, even when his palm got sweaty from nerves. When they got to her porch, she leaned up against the railing, tugged him closer by the hand, and pulled him down for a slow, soft kiss, tasting like sweet tea and fried catfish and the spearmint gum she’d been chewing. He wrapped his free hand around her waist, pulled her closer, didn’t waste time worrying about what the neighbors would see, didn’t overthink what this meant for his carefully curated routine. He just held her there, the crickets chirping in the grass around the porch, the last of the sun leaking over the hills behind them.
