The Baker's Typewriter

I kicked the tire. It didn't help. The flat sat there on my van lifeless, and I was forty miles from town on a gravel road at ten at night.

"Son of a bitch."

I had one spare, and it was in the shop with a nail in it. That's the kind of week I was having. I'm Rudy, I'm thirty-seven, I drive deliveries for a feed store, and my phone had one bar of signal, which meant it showed me a picture of no signal.

Then I saw the light. A grange hall, set back off the road, one lit window. Music coming through the walls, some country band doing soundcheck or something. And in that lit window, a shape. A woman's shape, moving around.

So I grabbed my work jacket and walked over.

The side door was unlocked. I knocked first, then tried it. It swung open into a kitchen, flour everywhere, the smell of bread so thick I could taste it. Nobody in the kitchen. But down the hall, through another doorway, I heard typing.

Real typing. Clack clack clack, ding.

I followed the sound into the main hall. Folding chairs stacked against the walls, a banner half hung, a folding table with a tablecloth. And behind the table sat a woman hunched over an old typewriter like it owed her money.

She was thirty-something, I figured. Dark hair pinned up with what looked like a pencil. Flour on her hands, flour dusting a canvas apron. Under the apron, leggings. The kind that leave nothing to the imagination. She hammered a key, stopped, and swore.

"Where the hell is the K. Who loses a K."

"Excuse me," I said.

She jumped so hard she nearly went over backward with the chair. She caught the table, caught the typewriter, caught herself. She looked at me like I'd crawled out of the flour bin.

"Whoa. Hello. Door was for knocking, buddy."

"I knocked."

"You knocked and opened."

"Fair." I put my hands up. "I'm sorry. I knocked, nothing happened, the door was open. I'm not here to rob you. I couldn't rob you. I don't even have a working tire."

She stared at me. Then she laughed, one short bark, and sat back down.

"Flat?"

"Blowout. Forty miles from anything. My phone's useless out here. I saw your light."

"Well." She wiped her hands on the apron, which did nothing since the apron was mostly flour already. "There's a phone on the wall in the kitchen. Landline. It works, mostly. And there's beer in the fridge, if you want one, because you look like a man having a night."

"I am having a night."

"Beer it is."

She walked ahead of me to the kitchen. I'm not proud of what my eyes did. The leggings did not help. Neither did the apron strings tying behind her, or the way the flour dust sat on her forearms. She caught me at the fridge, looking, and smirked like she knew exactly what I was doing.

"Beer," she said, handing me a can. "You're staring."

"Sorry. You look like you're between sets."

"Sets?"

"The dance. I heard the band. I figured you were a dancer taking a breather." I popped the can. "You know. Resting up."

Her eyebrows went up. Something changed in her face. I couldn't read it at first. Then I could. It was interest.

"A dancer," she said slowly.

"Yeah. Out here in the middle of nowhere, a dance, a woman in leggings looking like that. Seemed like a safe guess."

"Name's Sybil, by the way." She leaned against the counter and drank from her own can. Thirty-four, she told me, when I asked. She asked my age back and I told her thirty-seven. "So you thought I was a dancer."

"I thought you were a dancer."

"And you drove all the way out here for the dance?"

"Delivery run, actually. Feed store. But the dance was a bonus. And now the van's dead, so."

"So you're stuck."

"Stuck as a church."

She looked at me over the beer. The smirk was back. I don't know what came over me, exactly, except that she was looking at me the way a woman looks when she's already decided something, and I hadn't been looked at like that in a while. Divorced five years. Not much since. And here was a flour-dusted stranger in an empty hall with a band tuning up two rooms away.

"Can I say something blunt?" I said.

"Please. Blunt's my favorite."

"You're very attractive, and I'm stuck here for a while, and if you're the kind of woman who'd want a no-strings thing in a pantry with a stranger, I'm your guy. If not, forget I said it, and I'll go wait with my tire."

Silence. The band hit a chord in the other room, badly. Sybil set her can down on the counter. Very slow. Deliberate.

"A pantry," she repeated.

"There's a pantry. I saw the sign."

"You've been here four minutes."

"Three and a half, maybe."

That got a real laugh out of her. She bit her lip, thinking. I could practically see the gears. I should note here I felt pretty sure I'd blown it, and I was already composing my apology, and then she stepped closer.

"Here's my problem, Rudy," she said. "Everyone who wants me wants sweet Sybil. Gentle Sybil. Sybil who bakes your bread and fixes your typewriter and asks about your mother. Nobody wants just the body. Just the want."

"That's..." I swallowed. "That's actually exactly what I'm offering."

"I know. That's why I'm considering it."

"Consider away."

She looked me up and down, no hurry about it. Then she stuck out her hand like we were closing a business deal.

"Okay. One condition. You don't ask my last name, I don't ask yours, and after tonight you're a guy whose van broke down and I'm a woman who fixed a typewriter. Deal?"

"Deal." I shook her hand. Her grip was stronger than I expected. "But real quick, so we're square. You're sure? Clear head, sure sure?"

"Sure sure. I've had one beer and I've never been more clear about anything in my life." She was already untying the apron. "And if I say stop, you stop. Same goes for you, obviously."

"Obviously. Deal."

"And one more thing." She hung the apron on a hook, and now it was just her and the leggings and a plain gray t-shirt with flour on the collar. "The typewriter's missing the K key. If you see a K key anywhere tonight, you tell me. Priorities."

"K key. Got it."

"This way."

She led me down the hall past the kitchen, past a walk-in cooler humming to itself, to a door I never would have noticed. The pantry. Shelves of canned goods, paper towels, a case of the same beer we'd been drinking. There was a bare bulb on a pull chain, and she pulled it. Yellow light. Dust motes. A shelf at exactly the right height, which I chose not to think about yet.

She turned around and faced me in the little room. Close. Very close.