Manny Ruiz, 53, makes his living restoring antique typewriters out of a 300-square-foot shop tucked between a taqueria and a laundromat in east Austin. His biggest flaw, the one his ex-wife screamed about when she packed her bags 8 years prior, is that he’d rather apologize for existing than inconvenience anyone even a little. He lets regulars haggle him down 30% on fully restored Royals, he helps the laundromat owner fix her broken dryers for free, he’s turned down three first dates in the last year because he was scared he’d bore them talking about shift keys and ribbon spools.
The late October air at the weekend farmers market smells like roasted pecans and wood smoke and the faint tang of pickled okra from the stand two down from his pop-up table. He’s polishing a 1956 Quiet De Luxe, the calluses on his thumbs catching on the polished chrome, when a shadow falls over his work. He looks up, and his throat goes tight.
Lena Marquez is 49, his ex-wife’s first cousin, and the only person at their 2014 divorce mediation who didn’t glare at him like he’d personally burned down the family ranch. He hasn’t seen her in six years, not since she moved to Portland to work travel nurse shifts during the early pandemic. She’s wearing high-waisted black jeans, a cream cable knit sweater with a tiny frayed hole at the left elbow, work boots caked in oak leaves and red dirt. Her hair’s streaked with silver at the temples, pulled back in a loose braid, and she’s holding a paper bag of pecan pralines in one hand.
“Told my aunt I’d find you here,” she says, leaning one hip against the edge of his table, close enough that he can smell her perfume: sandalwood and vanilla, the same scent he’d caught a whiff of at a family wedding in 2012, when he’d spent half the night avoiding her gaze because he was married and she was laughing too loud and his chest felt too tight every time she looked his way. She nods at the typewriter under his rag. “I just closed on that little cottage out on Lake Travis, want something to write letters to my niece with. No laptops, no texts. Old school.”
She leans across the table to run a finger along the typewriter’s curved top edge, and her shoulder brushes his bicep. The contact is light, accidental, but Manny’s whole arm tingles. He yanks his hand back like he’s touched a hot soldering iron, half disgusted with himself for even noticing. She’s family. Off limits. Everyone in their extended Texas Mexican family would lose their minds if they so much as got coffee together. But when he meets her eyes, warm and dark and crinkled at the corners like she knows exactly what he’s thinking, he can’t make himself tell her to leave.
“Got that one all tuned up,” he says, nodding at the Royal. “Types like a dream. New ribbon, all the sticky keys fixed.”
“Great,” she says, grinning, and she pulls a folded slip of paper out of her jeans pocket, scribbles her address on it in bright purple gel pen. “Can you drop it off around 7? I’m making chili, got a six pack of Shiner Bock in the fridge. I remembered you drink that, from the cookouts back when you’d bring your famous brisket.”
Manny opens his mouth to say no. To tell her he’s got work to do, that it’s not a good idea, that people will talk. But he nods before the words can come out. He shoves the slip of paper in his flannel shirt pocket, and doesn’t look up until he hears her boots crunching away down the gravel market path.
He shows up at 7 on the dot, the typewriter wrapped in a moving blanket in the bed of his beat up Ford Ranger. The cottage door is propped open, and he can hear Patsy Cline playing low on a record player inside. He carries the typewriter in, sets it on her pine kitchen table, and she hands him a cold beer straight from the fridge. Their fingers brush when he takes it, and this time he doesn’t pull away.
“Ex told everyone you’re still a hermit who never leaves his shop,” she says, leaning back against the counter, her boot propped on the bottom rail. “Said you cared more about rusty typewriters than people.”
Manny snorts, takes a sip of beer. “She wasn’t entirely wrong, for a long time.”
“She was wrong about the rest, though,” Lena says, and she steps closer, close enough that he can feel the heat coming off her sweater, see the tiny freckles across her nose he’d never been close enough to notice before. Her hand brushes the back of his left hand, where he’s got a thin white scar from a typewriter spring snapping when he was 38. “I always thought she was an idiot for walking out. You love things so fiercely. That’s not a flaw.”
Manny’s throat feels thick. No one’s said that to him, not since his mom died 12 years ago. He opens his mouth to say something, anything, but she leans up and kisses him before he can. It’s slow, soft, tastes like cinnamon gum and the pecan pralines she was eating earlier, and for the first time in 8 years, he doesn’t overthink it. He doesn’t worry about what the family will say, doesn’t apologize for taking up space, doesn’t feel guilty for wanting something for himself.
They eat chili off paper plates sitting on her couch later, the wood stove popping and crackling in the corner, the typewriter sitting on the kitchen table by the window, catching the light from the string lights she’s strung above the sink. She asks if he wants to stay and help her type the first letter to her niece tomorrow, says she’s terrible at spelling and he’s always had perfect grammar. He nods, takes another sip of beer, feels the tight knot of anxiety he’s carried in his chest for almost a decade loosen up just a little.
He glances over at her, and when she smiles, he doesn’t even feel guilty for wanting what he’s always been too scared to take.
