Moe Sorrentino, 61, retired minor league baseball scout, had avoided the town’s annual summer food truck rally for 12 straight years. The grudge he held against his ex-wife, who’d founded the event and still emceed it most years, had calcified into a habit of holing up in his bungalow with cold beer and old scouting reports on the first Saturday of every June. This year, his former roommate had begged him to come, swearing the brisket truck from Asheville was making a rare appearance and his ex was 300 miles away visiting her sister in Myrtle Beach. Moe’s knee had been acting up less that week, so he caved.
He was 10 feet from the brisket line, sweating through the faded 2019 Charlotte Knights hat he wore everywhere, when a kid darted between his legs and he stumbled, spilling half his 32-ounce sweet tea down the front of a woman’s pale linen button-down. He started stammering an apology, reaching for the napkins in his pocket, when she laughed, low and warm, and swatted his hand away. She was 58, he guessed, silver hair pulled back in a braid streaked with honey blonde, forearms dusted with faint bee sting scars and crisscrossed with tiny scratch marks. He recognized her immediately: Lila, his ex-wife’s cousin, the one his ex had ranted about for decades, calling her a flighty leech who couldn’t keep her hands off other people’s things.
His first instinct was to step back, mumble a half-assed apology and bolt for his truck. Instead, he stood frozen when she leaned in, her shoulder brushing his chest, and wiped a stray drop of tea off the axe scar on his left forearm with the hem of her already ruined shirt. She smelled like raw honey and cedar, nothing like the heavy rose perfume his ex had worn every day of their 22-year marriage. “You’re Moe, right?” she said, holding his gaze for three long seconds, no flicker of awkwardness, no shy look away. “I saw you building birdhouses in the woodshop down on Main last month. The kids at the elementary school my granddaughter goes to still talk about those.”
“You gonna offer to buy me a replacement drink, scout?” she teased, and he realized he still hadn’t said anything coherent since he’d spilled the tea. He laughed, the first real, unforced laugh he’d had in weeks, and nodded, leading her toward the lemonade stand at the edge of the field. They talked for 45 minutes, leaning against the fence while the sun dipped lower, painting the sky pink and tangerine. She told him about her beekeeping co-op, how she’d started it after her husband died 8 years prior, how she sold small-batch honey at the farmers market every Saturday. He told her about scouting, about the time he’d accidentally hit a cow with his rental car outside a tiny minor league park in rural Alabama, about the knee injury that had forced him to retire three years earlier.
When the band finished their set and the crowd started to disperse, she tilted her head toward the parking lot, her thumb brushing the back of his hand where it rested on the fence rail. “I got a jar of sourwood honey back at my place that tastes better than any lemonade you’ve ever had,” she said, the corner of her mouth tugging up like she knew exactly what she was offering, exactly how many unspoken rules they’d be crossing if he said yes. He thought of his ex’s angry rants, of the quiet bungalow waiting for him, of the cold beer and the scouting reports he’d read a hundred times already. He thought of the way she’d noticed the birdhouses, the way her calloused hand felt against his, the way she hadn’t once asked about his ex, hadn’t once treated him like a footnote to someone else’s story.
He nodded. They drove separately, his old F-150 rumbling behind her tiny hatchback down the two-lane road that led out of town, past the cornfields and the small horse farms. He pulled into her gravel driveway two minutes after she did, and she was already leaning against the porch rail, holding two mason jars of iced tea, the row of wooden beehives at the edge of her yard glowing gold in the last of the sunset. She tossed one of the jars to him, and he caught it one-handed, the cold glass cool against his palm, just like he’d caught hundreds of fly balls when he was a kid playing rec ball in the Bronx.
