Elwood “Woody” Pritchard, 62, spent 37 years as an antique typewriter restorer in Boise, Idaho, before selling his shop three years prior when his wife left him for a 38-year-old pickleball coach she’d met at the rec center. His biggest flaw, one he’d stopped bothering to hide, was that he’d written off every potential casual interaction as a waste of time, convinced all women his age were either looking for a live-in caretaker or a free pass to his retirement savings. The only time he left his cedar-sided bungalow anymore was weekly trivia night at The Rusty Key, the dive bar three blocks from his house, where he usually competed with a retired mail carrier named Joe, who’d bailed that night to watch his granddaughter’s high school volleyball game.
The bar smelled like fried dill pickles, cheap rye, and the faint, sharp tang of sage carried in from the controlled burns the forest service had run earlier that week. The neon Pabst Blue Ribbon sign behind the bar flickered so bad it made the cheap laminated menus look like they were wiggling. The trivia host, a 22-year-old art student named Javi, wandered over holding a clipboard, nodded at the empty booth seat across from Woody, and said he had a last-minute walk-in who needed a partner. Woody grunted, ready to tell him to piss off, before he caught sight of the woman walking over behind Javi.
She was 58, he guessed, freckles scattered across her nose, gray streaks pulled back in a messy braid, flannel shirt rolled up to her elbows to reveal forearms crisscrossed with tiny, silvery burn scars. She slid into the booth without asking, her denim-clad knee brushing his under the table hard enough that he flinched, and she laughed, low and warm, before apologizing. “Maren,” she said, holding out a calloused hand. “Just moved out to a cottage west of town, set up a small glassblowing studio. Saw the trivia sign on the door and figured I’d test how much useless 70s pop culture I’ve got stuck in my head.”
Woody shook her hand, his own calloused from decades of prying stuck typebars and replacing rusted ink ribbons, and was surprised by how warm her skin was. She ordered a peppermint schnapps and a draft beer when the server came around, and Woody stuck to his usual bourbon on the rocks, already kicking himself for agreeing to the partner, convinced she’d drag his score down and cost him the $150 bar tab grand prize.
He was wrong. She nailed the first three questions about 1970s sci-fi B-movies, knew the exact year the first Royal Quiet De Luxe typewriter hit the market (1939, she said, and when he gaped at her, she explained she’d typed 12 full poetry manuscripts for her ex-husband on one, back when they lived in Portland), and even got the obscure question about which Idaho county grows the most winter wheat. When the bar got rowdy halfway through the final round, she leaned in across the table, her shoulder brushing his, and whispered the answer to a question about classic country music right in his ear, her breath warm and sharp with peppermint, and he had to fight not to shiver.
They won, by three points. Maren whooped so loud the table next to them turned to stare, and she lifted her beer to toast, sloshing a good three ounces of it onto the front of Woody’s faded denim work shirt. She swore, grabbing a handful of napkins from the dispenser on the table, and leaned in to dab at the wet spot, her hand resting light on his chest for a full two seconds before she pulled back.
Woody didn’t flinch this time. He stared at her, at the little crinkles at the corner of her eyes when she laughed at herself, and realized he hadn’t talked to another person for more than 10 minutes at a stretch in almost two years, let alone enjoyed it. The old familiar resistance flared first, the voice in his head that told him he was being an idiot, that this would only end with her leaving too, that he was better off alone with his half-restored Underwoods and his frozen TV dinners. But the desire was louder, quiet and warm, the feeling that someone was actually looking at him, not the grumpy old widower-adjacent guy the neighborhood left alone.
“I’ve got a beat up 1954 Royal in my cottage,” she said, wiping beer off her own jeans, “the carriage is stuck so bad I can’t even get the key in the shift lock. You wanna come take a look at it tomorrow? I’ll make peach pie, I baked one this morning and it’s still half in the pan.”
Woody nodded before he could talk himself out of it. They walked out to the parking lot together, the air cool enough that he could see his breath when he exhaled, the sky clear enough to see every star above the glow of the bar’s neon signs. She stopped next to her beat-up forest green Subaru covered in glassblowing studio stickers, turned to him, and kissed him first on the cheek, then on the mouth, soft and slow, tasting like peppermint and beer and the faint sweet tang of the cherry Lifesaver she’d been sucking on during the final round. He wrapped one arm around her waist, pulling her just a little closer, no overthinking, no stupid mental lists of why this was a bad idea.
When she handed him her phone to type in his number, his calloused repairman fingers didn’t fumble a single key.
