Elias Voss is 62, a retired antique typewriter restorer who still wears the same steel-toe work boots he bought for his first shop in 2001, and has a habit of ghosting text messages for three days even when he knows the sender is waiting for a part quote. He’s lived in the same 800-square-foot cottage outside Boise for 21 years, sleeps on the same flannel sheets his ex-wife left when she moved to Portland in 2005, and only leaves the property for grocery runs, hardware store runs, and the one annual summer craft fair his neighbor strong-arms him into attending, as payback for him fixing her 1947 Underwood No. 5 for free last spring.
He’d set up his booth at 7 a.m., hauling 12 restored typewriters in the bed of his beat-up Ford F-150, and had spent the first four hours avoiding small talk with passersby by pretending to adjust a type bar on a dented 1960s Smith Corona. Most people stopped to take a photo, ask if he sold typewriter key jewelry, and left. He was half considering packing up early when Mara Hale stepped into the shade of his pop-up canopy.
She smelled like jasmine perfume and lemon furniture polish, wore a loose linen sundress the color of wild clover, had sun freckles scattered across her nose, and was clutching a jar of pickled okra she’d bought from the pickle vendor two booths over. Elias recognized her immediately, even though the last time he’d seen her was 10 years prior, at his daughter’s high school parent-teacher conference, where he’d sat silently while she told him his daughter’s sketchbook was full of “brilliant, unfiltered work” that she’d be stupid not to pursue. His daughter had spent three years complaining Mara was the strictest teacher in the art department, so he’d written her off as a prissy, rule-obsessed stick in the mud, the exact kind of person he went out of his way to avoid.
She leaned in to get a closer look at the 1952 Royal Quiet De Luxe perched on the edge of his folding table, and her bare shoulder brushed the faded Merle Haggard tee stretched across his bicep. Elias froze. He hadn’t been touched by anyone who wasn’t his neighbor’s golden retriever in over two years. The calluses on his hands, permanently stained with typewriter ink around the nail beds, tingled.
“Is this one sold?” she asked, nodding at the Royal, her voice lower than he remembered, rougher, like she smoked a single cigarette every night before bed.
He shook his head. “Just finished restoring it last week. New platen, all new rubber feet, the keys stick less than my truck’s ignition.”
She laughed, a warm, throaty sound, and pulled out the folding chair he kept next to the table for test runs. When she scooted it closer to the table, her bare knee brushed the denim of his jeans, right above the hole worn through at the shin from kneeling on his workshop floor. He tensed again, half ashamed of how fast his pulse jumped. She was 15 years younger than him, for one. She was his daughter’s former teacher, for another. It felt wrong, like he was crossing a line he’d drawn for himself decades prior, the one that said he didn’t mess with people tied to the parts of his life that involved ex-wives and parent-teacher conferences and all the mess of being a younger, worse version of himself.
She typed a quick line on the Royal, the clack of the keys sharp over the fair’s background noise of food truck generators and kids yelling. She pulled the paper out, slid it across the table to him. It read: Elias fixes typewriters better than anyone in Idaho, and he has very good taste in band tees.
He laughed, a real one, the kind that makes his shoulders shake, that he almost never lets out in public. They talked for 40 minutes straight, no lulls, no awkward pauses. He found out she quit teaching last year, now runs a small glassblowing studio out of a converted garage downtown, has been looking for a typewriter for years because she hates typing poetry on her laptop, says the screen makes her words feel flat, disposable. She teases him about the ink smudge on his left cheek, about the fact he still has a flip phone in his pocket, about the way he keeps glancing at his truck like he’s considering making a run for it.
The conflicting feelings buzz under his skin the whole time, half disgust at himself for even thinking about asking her out, half raw, unnameable want, the kind he hasn’t felt since he was 20 and snuck into a bar with a fake ID. It’s stupid, it’s taboo, it’s the kind of thing his daughter would roast him for for the rest of his life, but he can’t make himself look away from her, from the way her hair falls over her shoulder when she leans forward to type another line, from the way her knee keeps brushing his calf every time she shifts in the chair.
When she asks what he wants for the Royal, he blurted it out before he can talk himself out of it. “Dinner tonight at the diner on 5th street. That jar of pickled okra you’re holding. And I’ll throw in a year of free tune-ups, whatever you need.”
She froze for half a second, then leaned in, her face six inches from his, close enough he can smell the cherry lip balm she’s wearing, close enough he can see the tiny gold flecks in her green eyes. She lifts a hand, brushes the ink smudge off his cheek with her thumb, the contact soft, deliberate, not an accident this time.
“Deal,” she says, grinning. “But you have to stop looking like you just stole a candy bar from the gas station every time our knees touch. It’s very cute, but it’s making me feel like I’m corrupting a senior citizen.”
They pack up his booth together, the crowd thinning as the sun starts to dip low over the fairgrounds. When they lift the heavy wooden case holding the Royal into the bed of his truck, her hand brushes his for three full seconds, calloused from glassblowing, warm, solid. He opens the passenger door for her, she climbs in, sets the jar of pickled okra in the cupholder, and starts humming a Patsy Cline song under her breath when he turns the key in the ignition. He pulls out of the fair parking lot, the wind coming through the open window carrying the smell of her jasmine perfume, and doesn’t even glance at the flip phone buzzing in his pocket, the text from his daughter asking how the fair went.
