Elias Voss is 61, a vintage typewriter restorer who’s run his one-man shop out of a converted Portland garage for 22 years. His biggest flaw is a rabid refusal to deviate from routine: he eats the same turkey sandwich for lunch every day, hasn’t owned a smartphone since they hit the market, and hasn’t so much as flirted with anyone since his ex-wife left him for a crossfit coach 9 years prior. He’d only stopped by the neighborhood Oktoberfest block party to drop off a repaired 1960s Hermes to a regular customer, planned to slip out after 10 minutes max, back to his garage and the half-restored Royal Quiet De Luxe on his workbench.
He’s leaning against a bratwurst truck, plastic stein of amber lager in one hand, waiting for his customer to weave through the crowd, when he spots her. Lila Marquez, 42, the new city council rep who’d pushed through the home business zoning ordinance that almost shut his shop down a month prior. He’d spent three straight nights digging through 1970s city records to prove his shop was grandfathered in, collected 412 signatures from regulars across the city, had yelled at her through a Zoom screen for 12 minutes straight at a public hearing. He tenses, planning to slip around the side of the truck, but she spots him first, grinning, and cuts through the crowd before he can move.
She’s not in the crisp blazer she wore to every council meeting, he notices. She’s got on a faded Pearl Jam tee, flannel tied around her waist, scuffed black combat boots, hair pulled back in a messy braid, no makeup. She holds out a hand, palm calloused, and he hesitates before shaking it, her grip firm. “I owe you a huge apology,” she yells over the bluegrass band playing at the end of the block, the smell of grilled onions and sauerkraut hanging thick between them. “I had no clue how many people your shop served until the petition hit my desk. I messed up.”
She’s standing close enough that he can smell cinnamon whiskey on her breath, mixed with the crisp fall air. A group of drunk college kids stumble past, one slamming into her shoulder, and she stumbles into him, her bicep pressing firm against his forearm. She doesn’t step back. She tells him her dad had a 1951 Royal KMM that he’d used to write freelance travel articles his whole life, he died last spring, and she’s been looking for someone to restore it, didn’t realize the shop she almost shut down was run by the best typewriter restorer on the west coast. Elias finds himself snorting, teasing her that she could’ve saved both of them a lot of headache if she’d done her research first. She winces, flags down a beer vendor, buys him a second lager to make up for it.
They stand there for 20 minutes, talking over the music, the crowd bumping into them every few seconds, their shoulders brushing over and over again. He notices the thin scar above her left eyebrow, asks about it, she laughs and says she got it trying to climb a barbed wire fence to sneak into a music festival when she was 19. He tells her about the time he fell off a fire tower when he was 20, working a summer wildland fire crew, still has a scar on his left hip from it. A group of kids dart past chasing a scruffy golden retriever, one slams into Elias’s back hard, and he stumbles forward, his hand landing flat on Lila’s waist to steady himself. He freezes, ready to yank his hand away and apologize, but she covers his hand with hers, holds it there for a beat, her dark eyes locked on his, no grin, no teasing, just warm and steady.
All the residual frustration he’d held onto for her over the last month vanishes, replaced by a tight, warm buzz in his chest he hasn’t felt in almost a decade. He tells her he’ll restore her dad’s Royal for free, if she lets him take her to dinner at the diner down the street from his shop later that week, no city business talk, just typewriters, bad 90s rock stories, and whatever else she wants to ramble about.
She grins, squeezing his hand where it still rests on her waist, says she’ll agree only if she gets to pay for dinner, and she’s bringing the Royal to his shop the next morning so he can assess the damage first. She pulls his beat-up flip phone out of his hand (he’d pulled it out earlier to check the time) and types her number into it, her fingers brushing his knuckles when she hands it back. The band switches to a slow, twangy cover of Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues,” and she nods toward the makeshift dance floor set up in the middle of the street, tugging gently on his wrist. He shakes his head, says he hasn’t danced since his wedding in 1994, and he was terrible at it then. She tugs harder, laughing, says there’s a first time for everything, even for a grumpy typewriter restorer who yells at city council members on Zoom. He lets her pull him toward the crowd, his second lager still cold in his free hand, the rough callus on her palm pressing firm against his wrist, and for the first time in almost a decade, he doesn’t feel the urge to map out every single detail of the rest of his night.
