Maceo Rourke, 57, makes his living restoring antique phonographs and jukeboxes out of the converted garage behind his yellow clapboard house in rural Ohio, and his biggest flaw is he cannot say no to a favor. For 11 years running, he’s canceled his own planned fishing trips, skipped the annual vintage audio convention in Chicago, and bailed on every half-formed date friends tried to set up for him to fix a neighbor’s broken transistor, a church’s crackling PA system, or an elderly widow’s stuck cuckoo clock. His ex-wife left him eight years prior mid-anniversary dinner, when he got a call about a local bar’s busted 1960s jukebox and left halfway through their steak, and he’s never bothered arguing that she was right to go.
He’s hunched over the jukebox he restored for the town’s annual summer block party, sweat beading at his hairline under his worn baseball cap, when he smells coconut sunscreen and citrus seltzer drift over the hum of grill smoke and kids’ laughter. He doesn’t have to look up to know it’s Lena Marlow, the 52-year-old traveling nurse who moved into the blue house two doors down three weeks prior, the woman he’s bailed on three separate times in the last 10 days after she asked him to look at a 1940s record player she found at a local thrift store. He’d canceled first to fix Mrs. Henderson’s sagging gutters before a thunderstorm, second to patch the local vet’s exam room radio, third to help the high school drama club fix their sound system for an end-of-year play, and he’s been actively crossing the street to avoid her ever since, equal parts embarrassed and weirdly flustered at the way his chest tightens every time she grins.
She leans down next to him, her linen shirt brushing the top of his shoulder, and grabs the warm can of Pabst off the gravel next to his boot to hold it out to him. Her knuckle brushes his when he takes it, and he fumbles a little, cold beer sloshing over the edge onto his work jeans. “You gonna keep hiding behind this hunk of metal all night, or are you gonna stop making excuses to avoid me?” she says, and he can hear the smirk in her voice before he looks up. Her eyes are dark, crinkled at the corners from sun, and she holds eye contact long enough that his ears burn, the low twang of Patsy Cline kicking out of the jukebox speakers right as he opens his mouth to stammer an apology.
He rambles through a list of the favors that made him cancel, and she snorts, leaning against the side of the jukebox so her hip is pressed to his elbow, close enough he can smell the cherry lip balm she’s wearing under the sunscreen. “I don’t care about the excuses. I care that you keep putting every random person in this town’s needs above your own, and I’m calling you out on it,” she says, and he freezes, because no one’s said that to him since his ex-wife walked out. The conflict sits sharp in his chest, half irritation that she’s calling him out, half hot, thrumming want that she’s paying enough attention to notice his stupid people-pleasing habit in the first place.
She offers a bet, then, her head tilted so the sun catches the silver streak in her dark hair, the tiny scar at the corner of her mouth pulling up when she grins. If he comes over to her place tonight to look at the record player, she’ll give him the pecan pie she baked that morning, the one she mentioned she makes with bourbon in the crust, and he has to say no to every favor anyone asks him for the entire weekend. No gutters, no broken radios, no cuckoo clocks. If he bails again, he has to help her paint her entire living room next weekend, no exceptions.
He hesitates for three full seconds, the sound of kids yelling chasing each other with water guns fading into the back of his head, the feel of her hip pressed to his arm seeping through the thin fabric of his work shirt. He’s spent so long being the guy everyone can count on, he’d forgotten what it felt like to want something for himself, the quiet, giddy thrill of choosing his own plans over someone else’s. He nods, before he can talk himself out of it, and she laughs, a low, warm rumble, and taps her beer can against his.
He spends the rest of the party half listening to neighbors stop by to compliment the jukebox, half watching her laugh with the group of teachers down the block, her head thrown back, her beer held loosely in one hand. When the sun dips low and the party starts to break down, she walks over to him, kicks a small rock against his boot, and jerks her head toward her house. He grabs his toolbox from the bed of his truck, ignores a text from Mrs. Henderson asking if he can come look at her broken ceiling fan tomorrow, shoves his phone in his pocket, and follows her up the sidewalk to her porch, the scent of pecan pie drifting through her open screen door before she even turns the knob.
