Javi Mendez, 52, vintage typewriter repair technician, swipes a grease-stained cotton rag across his forehead for the third time in ten minutes. He’d told his regular customer Mabel he had zero interest in manning a booth at the Maplewood Summer Street Fair, but she’d baked him two peaches-and-cream pies and threatened to take her 1930s Underwood repair business to the hack in Toledo who knew half as much about spring tension as he did, so he caved. The booth’s vinyl stickiness seeps through the knees of his work jeans when he shifts his weight, the bluegrass band three stalls down is sawing through a cover of Rocky Top so loud his molars rattle, and half the people who’ve stopped by have asked if he sells laptop chargers. He’s counting down the minutes until 8PM, when the fair shuts down and he can go home to his quiet cinder block workshop, cold IPA, and zero mandatory small talk. For eight years, ever since his ex-wife left him for a ride operator at this exact fair, he’s avoided all community events, all casual hangs, anything that could lead to the kind of messy, public heartbreak that makes small town cashiers give you pitying looks for a year. The rule has worked just fine, no exceptions, until 7:42PM, when Lila Marlow walks up.
He recognizes her immediately: she runs the front desk at the public library, he’s dropped off donated restored typewriters for the kids’ craft days a handful of times over the years, always left before he could say more than a quick hello. She’s wearing cutoff denim shorts, a faded 1994 Johnny Cash tour tee, and her dark auburn hair is pulled back in a messy braid, a few strands stuck to the sweat glistening on her neck. She leans over the booth’s edge, close enough that he can smell lavender hand lotion mixed with the cotton candy drifting from the stand across the street, and taps a polished fingernail on the Royal Quiet De Luxe sitting front and center on his display table. “My grandma had that exact one,” she says, and her voice is low, rough around the edges from years of yelling at her kid’s high school soccer matches, he remembers. He reaches to adjust the typewriter’s shift key, which has a tendency to stick if it hasn’t been tapped in a few hours, and his hand brushes hers. The contact is quick, warm, sends a jolt up his forearm that he hasn’t felt in closer to a decade than he cares to admit. He yanks his hand back like he’s touched a hot soldering iron, mumbles an apology. She laughs, not unkind, and leans in a little closer, her elbow now resting on the booth edge, two inches from his.
He’s halfway to making his standard line about the display model not being for sale, when she says she’s been looking for someone to restore the exact same Royal her grandma left her, the one she used to write dispatches from the Korean War, that she’s been trying to write a memoir of her grandma’s time overseas and can’t stand the idea of typing it on a laptop. He finds himself leaning in too, forgetting about the clock ticking down to closing, forgetting about the couple yelling over a burnt corn dog order next to him, forgetting the rule he carved into the workbench in his shop a month after his divorce: no attachments, no exceptions. She asks him how long he’s been fixing typewriters, he tells her he started after he got laid off from the Ford plant in 2010, needed something that didn’t feel like it was designed to break after two years of use. She laughs at his joke about how typewriters don’t send you passive aggressive texts at 2AM, don’t hide likes on your ex’s Instagram, just type exactly what you tell them to, no edits, no takebacks. He notices the faint scar on her left wrist from a childhood bike crash, the smudge of blue ink on her thumb from stamping library books, the way her hazel eyes crinkle at the corners when she smiles, like she doesn’t do it as much as she should.
The bluegrass band cuts out at 8PM sharp, the strung fair lights start blinking off one by one, and a teen volunteer with a walkie talkie yells that all vendors need to pack up for the night. He’s already mentally rehearsing the excuse he uses to turn down every invite: “Sorry, I got an early repair call tomorrow,” when she tilts her head, nods at the fried Twinkie stand that’s still serving the last stragglers, and says, “You wanna get one of those and a beer? I got a cooler in my SUV parked down the street, we can talk about the restoration timeline, no pressure.” His first instinct is to say no, old habit, fear of getting attached to something that’ll just leave again, the unspoken small town rule that you don’t go for people you run into at the grocery store, at the library, at the damn fair where your marriage ended. He glances at her hand, resting on the booth edge now, half an inch from his, and she doesn’t look away, no flirty games, no awkward hesitation, just steady.
He says yes. They grab the fried Twinkie, dusted in powdered sugar, oozing warm vanilla filling, and walk three blocks to her dark gray 4Runner parked under a gnarled oak tree. She pulls two cold IPAs out of the cooler in the back, hands one to him, and they sit on the curb next to the passenger side tire, their shoulders brushing when they shift their weight. The powdered sugar gets on her jeans, on the cuff of his work shirt, and she laughs when he tries to wipe it off her knee, his calloused fingers brushing the soft denim for half a second longer than necessary. She tells him her divorce finalized six months ago, that her kid’s off at college in Columbus, that she’s been scared to do anything that feels even a little reckless for 20 years. He tells her about his ex, about the rule he carved into his workbench, about how he hasn’t sat on a curb eating junk food with anyone since he was 19. The sun’s almost all the way down now, fireflies blinking in the clover by the sidewalk, the distant sound of people folding up fair booths drifting over. She takes a sip of her beer, turns to him, and says she has the Royal sitting on her kitchen table, if he wants to come look at it tomorrow, no rush, no obligation. He nods, takes a sip of his own beer, their fingers brushing when they both set their cans down on the curb at the same time.
A firefly lands on the end of her braid for three slow beats before flitting off, and for the first time in eight years, he doesn’t spend the whole time waiting for the other shoe to drop.
