Manny Ruiz, 52, makes his living prying decades of soda stickiness and grime out of vintage pinball machines out of his cinder block garage outside Asheville. He’s spent the eight years since his divorce carefully curating a life with zero surprises: same order at the diner every Tuesday, same corner table at the weekly VFW fish fry on Fridays, same three cable news channels on rotation when he’s sanding down old backglass at his workbench. His worst flaw, the one his ex-wife yelled about on their way out of the courthouse, is that he’ll bend over backwards to keep the peace even if it makes him miserable. He hasn’t so much as flirted with anyone since the split, convinced any kind of unplanned connection would only upend the quiet routine he’s built.
He’s wiping flecks of silver solder off his calloused knuckles with a paper napkin when she walks in, and he does a double take. It’s Elara Voss, wife of the newly elected county commissioner, the woman he’s only ever seen in tailored cream blazers and kitten heels at county board meetings, the one who always smiles and shakes everyone’s hand like she’s been trained to do it. Tonight she’s in frayed high-waisted jeans and work boots caked in pine mud, her dark hair pulled back in a messy braid, no makeup on. She’s alone, no sign of her crisp, perpetually harried husband, and she’s scanning the room like she’s looking for someone.
Her eyes land on him, and she grins, walking straight over before he can pretend to be fascinated by his plate of catfish and hushpuppies. She says she saw his van, the one with the neon pinball decal plastered on the side, at the county fair last month, when he was setting up a row of restored 70s machines for the arcade tent. She slides into the bench across from him before he can offer, and her knee brushes his under the table, accidental, the heat of it seeping through the worn denim of his work jeans so fast he flinches a little. She smells like pine resin and citrus gum, and when she leans her elbows on the table, he can see a faint smudge of dirt on her cheekbone, like she’d been hiking earlier.
She tells him her husband’s out of town for a three-day conference in Raleigh, and she bailed on the stuffy charity gala he’d made her promise to attend, because she’d rather eat fried catfish than make small talk with a bunch of rich people who call pinball “a waste of space.” She found a 1978 Space Invaders pinball machine in her grandma’s basement last week, beat up, all the flippers stuck, and her husband told her to drag it to the dump, called it garbage. She’s been looking for him ever since, she says, because she remembers playing that exact machine at the arcade when she was a kid, and she doesn’t want to throw it out.
Manny’s chest tightens, and he’s halfway to making an excuse about being booked solid for the next month before he catches himself. He knows the rules in this small town: you don’t mess with the county commissioner’s wife, no matter how nice she is, no matter how she laughs when he tells the story about the time he got a flipper spring stuck in his hair last winter. He can hear the jukebox in the corner thumping Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues,” the distant clink of beer bottles, the crunch of hushpuppies at the next table over. She leans in further when he shows her the scar on his left knuckle from a soldering accident last spring, her fingers brushing his wrist for half a second when she points at the faint white line, and he feels his face heat up, like he’s 16 again fumbling through his first date.
He fights with himself for another two minutes, half disgusted with himself for even considering it, half giddy at the way she’s looking at him like he’s the most interesting person in the room, not the quiet guy who fixes arcade games and never talks to anyone. No one’s asked him this many questions about his work in years, not even his ex-wife, who used to complain that he cared more about old pinball machines than he cared about her. Finally, he nods, says he can stop by her place tomorrow afternoon, when her husband’s still gone, to take a look at the machine. He scrawls his cell number on a crumpled napkin, his hand shaking a little when he hands it to her.
She tucks the napkin into the pocket of her jeans, then leans across the table, pressing a soft, quick kiss to his cheek. Her lip gloss is faint cherry, and it brushes the corner of his mouth by accident, the taste of it sweet against his skin. She says she’ll text him the address first thing in the morning, then she stands up, waves over her shoulder, and walks out, her boots thudding against the linoleum floor.
Manny sits there for another ten minutes, picking at his cold catfish, the faint tingle of her kiss still lingering on his cheek. For the first time in eight years, he doesn’t drive straight home to watch old western reruns after the fry ends. He stops at the auto parts store on the way back, and picks up a brand new set of Space Invaders flipper rubbers, just in case.
