Moe Sorrentino, 59, vintage pinball machine restorer, is parked on a dented folding chair by the neighborhood block party taco truck when he first spots her. He’s only here because his next-door neighbor Marie promised him a box of homemade cannoli, otherwise he’d be holed up in his converted garage shop, sanding the cabinet of a 1976 KISS pinball machine and sipping cheap bourbon while the Pirates game hummed on his crackling transistor radio. The July air sticks to his forearms like cellophane, his Iron City beer sweats through the paper coozie he grabbed from his workbench, and the group of retired steelworkers three chairs over are yelling so loud about the Steelers’ third round draft pick he’s half tempted to pack up and leave before Marie even shows up with the pastries.
She’s leaning against the dented streetlamp at the edge of the blocked-off street, holding a cherry snow cone so syrupy it’s dripping red down her wrist, a faded 1989 Tom Petty Full Moon Fever tour shirt peeking out under an unbuttoned linen button-down, jeans cuffed twice at the ankle, beat-up white Converse caked with mud from the walking trail at the edge of town. He recognizes her as the new librarian who moved into the old yellow clapboard house three doors down from his shop two months prior, the one who made the local news last month for telling a group of book-ban protestors to “go read a dictionary if you’re that pressed about words you don’t like.” He’d snickered when he saw the clip on the neighborhood Facebook group, but never had a reason to walk over and introduce himself.
She weaves through the crowd of kids chasing fireflies and couples slow dancing to the Bruce Springsteen cover band set up on the sidewalk, stops right in front of his chair, and nods at the empty folding seat next to him. “This taken?” Her voice is rough, like she smokes a pack a day, or yells at book banners for a living, both, probably. He grunts a no, shifts his tool bag off the chair to the ground at his feet, sits up a little straighter for no reason he can name. When she sits, her elbow brushes his, and he catches a whiff of coconut sunscreen and cherry syrup and old paper, the same smell as the library he visited as a kid in Youngstown.
She mentions she saw his shop sign last week when she was walking her pit bull mix, Mabel, has a 1978 Space Invaders pinball machine her dad left her when he died last spring, it’s been sitting in her basement for six months, won’t turn on, she’s called three other repair guys and all of them bailed or quoted her a price so high she figured she’d just use it as a very heavy end table. He’s got a rule against residential jobs, hates having to make small talk in strangers’ houses, hates people hovering over his shoulder while he works, hasn’t let anyone who isn’t Marie into his own space for anything more than a pickup of a repaired machine in 12 years, not since his wife left him for a travel nurse she met on a cruise. He opens his mouth to tell her he’s booked solid for the next three months, but then she leans in a little, eyes crinkling at the corners, and says she used to blow every last dollar of her grad school stipend on pinball at a dive bar in Cleveland, knows the difference between a pop bumper and a slingshot, can even nudge a machine without tilting it, and he stops.
Her snow cone drips onto the thigh of her jeans, she reaches for the stack of napkins on his lap to wipe it up, her hand brushing the rough denim of his work pants for half a second, and he tenses up, not out of discomfort, but out of the sharp, unexpected jolt of want that shoots up his spine, the kind he hasn’t felt since he was 20 years old and sneaking into his girlfriend’s parents’ basement after curfew. He’s disgusted with himself for a second, for even entertaining the idea of letting someone new into his carefully constructed, quiet little life, for risking the peace he spent 12 years building for a pretty woman who likes pinball and fights book bans and smells like coconut. But then she laughs at his grumpy joke about people who bring their snot-nosed kids into his shop and bang on the machine glass like they’re trying to break into a bank, and her hazel eyes catch the golden glow of the string lights strung between the telephone poles, and he can’t remember the last time someone laughed at one of his jokes like that, like they actually get it.
He tells her he’ll come by her house tomorrow at 10 a.m. to look at the Space Invaders machine, no charge for the house call, just buy him a coffee when he gets there. She grins so wide the corners of her eyes crinkle, grabs a napkin out of the stack on his lap, scribbles her address and phone number on it with a sparkly purple pen she pulls out of her shirt pocket, shoves it into the breast pocket of his faded work flannel, even though it’s 82 degrees out and he’s sweating through the collar. She says she’s gotta go let Mabel out, she’s been crated since 3 p.m., waves over her shoulder when she walks down the street, the cherry red of her snow cone stain still visible on her wrist.
He sits there for another 20 minutes, finishes his beer, eats two more cannoli, twists the napkin with her phone number in his pocket over and over between his fingers, realizes he hasn’t felt this light, this unburdened by the weight of his own stupid rules, since before his wife left. He doesn’t overthink it, doesn’t spiral into what ifs about it going wrong, about her bailing or hating his shop or thinking he’s too much of a grumpy old hermit to bother with. He stands up, tosses his empty beer can into the recycling bin by the taco truck, slings his tool bag over his shoulder, and walks back toward his shop, already mentally running through the list of replacement fuses and wiring harnesses he has in his storage closet that might work for her Space Invaders machine.