Elias Voss, 61, has restored more than 4,200 antique typewriters in the 23 years he’s run his shop out of a converted one-car garage in northeast Portland. His knuckles are perpetually stained indigo from old ribbon ink, his Carhartt work coat has a frayed hole at the elbow where he leans against workbenches, and his only regular social outing is a Thursday pilsner at the neighborhood beer garden, where he sits at the same picnic table under the string lights and crunches peanut shells under his work boots. He’s a lifelong perfectionist who’s avoided casual connection for 12 years, ever since his wife left him after he blew off their 25th anniversary Costa Rica trip to finish restoring a 1927 Underwood owned by a famous Beat poet. He tells himself he likes the quiet, that messy human interactions never turn out as well as a perfectly aligned typebar.
That Thursday, the usual bartender is out with a sprained ankle. The woman behind the counter is new, late 50s, with silver streaks in her wavy dark hair and indigo paint chips under her nails that match the ink on Elias’s hands. She brings his pilsner over before he even flags her down, her forearm brushing the top of his shoulder when she sets the frosty glass down, and he catches a whiff of jasmine lotion mixed with citrus seltzer. “Elias, right?” she says, holding eye contact a beat longer than necessary, her mouth tugging up at the corner. “Saw your shop sign down the street. My ex-husband used to rant about you all the time. Said you stole his state typing contest trophy back in 1980.”
Elias’s jaw tightens. Roger Hale. The guy who’d spread the rumor Elias cheated to win the regional contest, who’d stolen his spot on the yearbook staff, who’d married his high school crush the summer after graduation. He feels a sharp flick of old resentment, paired with a weird, hot spark of something he hasn’t felt in years. He knows he should brush her off, that messing with Roger’s ex is the kind of cheap, petty move he’d never let himself make, but he finds himself leaning back against the picnic table bench, tilting his head. “Didn’t steal anything. He typed 87 words a minute, I typed 92. Sore loser.”
She laughs, loud and warm, and sits down across from him uninvited. Her name is Lena, she says, a former high school art teacher who moved to Portland three months prior after her youngest kid left for NYU, got the bartending gig to meet people after 30 years of grading watercolor assignments. She asks about his typewriters, doesn’t roll her eyes when he rants about modern ribbon manufacturers cutting corners on dye quality, leans forward when he describes the satisfaction of fixing a typewriter that hasn’t worked in 60 years, her knee brushing his under the table by accident. He doesn’t move away.
By closing time, a light Oregon drizzle has started falling, turning the sidewalks dark and making the air smell like wet pine and grilled bratwurst residue. Lena locks up the beer garden, tucks her wallet in her jacket pocket, and asks if he minds if she walks with him to his shop, says she’s never seen a typewriter restoration space in person. He agrees, and they walk slow, their shoulders brushing every few steps, neither of them mentioning the 40 years of unspoken history tied to her ex-husband.
Inside the shop, the lights are low, the air smells like lemon oil and old paper. He pulls out the 1952 Royal Quiet De Luxe he just finished restoring for a poet in Brooklyn, gestures for her to sit at the workbench. When her fingers hover wrong over the home row, he reaches over to adjust her index finger on the F key, his knuckle brushing the soft skin of her wrist, and both of them freeze for half a second. He admits he’d had a crush on her back in high school, never said anything because she was dating Roger, thought she was out of his league. She snorts, says she’d noticed him too, the quiet kid with ink on his hands who always sat in the back of English class writing poetry on a beat-up Royal, thought Roger was an arrogant jerk even back then.
They share the bottle of cheap cabernet he keeps behind the counter for clients who wait through long repairs, talk until 1 a.m., and when she leaves, she forgets her wool jacket draped over the back of a work stool. He finds it the next morning when he comes in to start on a 1930s Remington, the fabric soft from years of wear, still holding a faint whiff of jasmine. He types a short note on the Royal he’d showed her the night before, folds it, and tucks it into the jacket’s inner pocket, then hangs the coat on the hook right next to his own Carhartt, where he can see it when he works. He doesn’t check his watch every five minutes, doesn’t overthink if she’ll come back to get it. He just sits down, adjusts his work glasses, and starts cleaning the Remington’s typebars, waiting.
