Delmar Hargrove is 62, makes his living restoring antique typewriters out of the cinder block workshop behind his house in eastern Tennessee, and has spent the last 12 years actively avoiding any woman his ex-wife ever shared a cup of coffee with. The divorce was messy, his ex ran off with his former business partner who he’d known since high school, and the town gossip mill chewed him up and spit him out for a solid two years before they moved on to the next small town scandal. He only agreed to come to the late summer community cookout because his 16-year-old granddaughter begged him; she was selling hand-woven friendship bracelets to raise money for her 4-H livestock project, and she’d said her friends all thought her grandpa’s calloused, ink-stained fingers were “cool.”
He’s leaning against a splintered oak tree 20 feet from the grill, holding a paper plate heaped with pulled pork and coleslaw, when he spots Marnie Carter walking toward him. She’s 58, runs the used bookstore on Main Street, was married to the high school football coach until he dropped dead of a heart attack on the sidelines four years prior, and is very good friends with Delmar’s ex-wife. He’d met her a month earlier, when she dropped off a dented 1952 Royal typewriter that had been her husband’s, asking if he could get it working again. He’d spent three evenings fixing the stuck keys and replacing the ribbon spool, and when she came to pick it up she’d handed him a jar of wild blackberry jam she’d canned herself, so sweet he didn’t even have the heart to charge her for the work.
She’s wearing that same faded indigo denim shirt she had on that day, sleeves rolled up to her elbows, a smudge of what looks like blue ink on her left wrist, and flip flops that have tiny sunflowers printed on the straps. She stops so close to him their shoulders almost brush, and he can smell coconut sunscreen and the faint, sweet scent of the peppermint lip balm she always wears, mixed with the hickory smoke curling off the grill nearby. She grins at his granddaughter, who’s holding up a braided bracelet strung with blue glass beads, and when she reaches past Delmar to grab the bracelet her knuckles brush his forearm, warm and soft, and he flinches like he’s been burned.
He glances over her shoulder, sees three of his ex-wife’s bridge club friends sitting at a picnic table 10 feet away, leaning in toward each other, whispering, one of them already thumbing at her phone. The old, familiar twist of disgust curls in his gut—disgust at the vultures who never had anything better to do than pick apart his life, disgust at himself for even letting himself notice how bright Marnie’s smile is, how the sun is catching the silver streaks in her auburn hair just right. He spent 12 years hiding from this exact kind of drama, holed up in his workshop fixing other people’s old memories instead of making any of his own, and the last thing he needs is the whole town talking about him chasing after his ex-wife’s friend.
She asks him if he wants to walk down to the creek at the edge of the park, get away from the noise and the crowd, and he hesitates for half a second. He can practically hear the gossip already, the snickers at the grocery store, the passive aggressive comments from his ex when she drops off the grandkids next weekend. But then she tilts her head at him, eyes crinkling at the corners, and he thinks that he’s 62 years old, he’s paid his dues, he doesn’t owe anyone a single explanation for how he spends his afternoons. He nods, tells his granddaughter he’ll be back in 20 minutes, and follows her down the dirt path lined with goldenrod.
The path winds past the baseball diamond and a patch of blackberry bushes, crickets chirping loud in the grass, the sun dipping low enough to turn the whole sky soft pink and orange. She kicks off her flip flops when they reach the creek, steps into the shallow, cool water, and stumbles over a smooth, half-buried rock, her ankle brushing his calf as she reaches out to steady herself. He catches her elbow, his calloused fingers wrapping around her soft skin, and they lock eyes for a beat, no awkward fumbling, no rushed apologies, just that quiet, thrumming tension that had been hanging between them since she first walked into his workshop.
They sit down on a half-rotted log at the edge of the water, and she pulls a crumpled pack of peppermints from her jeans pocket, passes him one. He tells her about the 1927 Underwood typewriter he’s currently restoring for a college student in Nashville, the one that had been owned by a local poet back in the 60s, and she tells him about the first edition copy of *The Old Man and the Sea* someone had dropped off at the bookstore that morning, still in its original dust jacket, worth at least $800. He doesn’t think about the bridge club women, doesn’t think about his ex-wife, doesn’t think about any of the stupid small town gossip that had kept him locked up for over a decade.
The cool creek water laps at the toes of his scuffed work boots, her shoulder is pressed solidly against his now, and she lifts her free hand to point at a great blue heron gliding slow across the far end of the water, its wings barely moving.
