Ronan O’Malley, 53, has spent the last 12 years as a Gulf Coast minor league scout for the Houston Astros, logging 40,000 miles a year in his beat-up 2018 F-150, surviving on gas station boudin and lukewarm sweet tea. His biggest flaw, the one he won’t admit to even himself, is that he’s hidden behind a self-imposed “no fraternization” rule for seven years, ever since his wife left him for a high school football coach, convinced any even casual connection that bleeds into his work makes him a failure of a professional and a disloyal ex-husband, even if the divorce papers were signed and filed before the last moving truck pulled out of his driveway. He’s at a crawfish boil in a tiny town outside Lafayette on a humid April Saturday, scouting a 19-year-old left-handed pitcher with a 94 mph fastball and a curveball that drops like a cinder block, leaning against a loblolly pine with a beer in a foam crawfish-themed koozie, the back of his neck burning under the late afternoon sun, crawfish shells crunching under the scuffed leather of the work boots he still wears even when he’s not tramping through high school outfields.
He pushes off the tree to reach for a paper plate piled high with boiled corn and andouille sausage, and his hand brushes another when they both grab for the same jar of extra spicy Cajun sauce. He looks down, meets warm brown eyes crinkled at the corners from laughing, the woman standing so close he can smell cinnamon and cut grass and the faint briny tang of crawfish on her shirt. She’s the pitcher’s aunt, he finds out a minute later, runs a beignet shop three blocks from the JC campus, has a smudge of powdered sugar on her left wrist and a silver hoop earring in one ear that catches the sun every time she tilts her head to tease him about the faded Astros cap he’s worn since 2017, when they won the World Series. He can feel the heat rise up his neck, and he hates it, hates that he’s noticing the way her jeans fit just right, the way she tucks a strand of curly dark hair behind her ear when she’s listening, hates that the accidental brush of her hand sent a jolt up his arm that he hasn’t felt in longer than he can remember. He tells himself he should walk away, go sit with the rest of the JC coaching staff, stop talking to her, that this is exactly the kind of thing he’s avoided for years, that it’s unprofessional, that he’s just bored from being on the road too long.
He doesn’t walk away. They stand by the picnic table for 40 minutes, talking about the kid’s work ethic, about the time she drove 12 hours to watch him pitch in a summer league tournament in Alabama, about the time Ronan tore his rotator cuff in college and had to give up playing before he ever got drafted, the scar on his left forearm still raised and pale when he rolls up his flannel sleeve to show her. They stand close enough that her shoulder bumps his every time someone squeezes past to get to the beer cooler, she holds eye contact two beats longer than is polite every time he makes a dry joke about the league’s obsession with launch angles, doesn’t look away when he catches her staring at the scar. When the pickup game the JC guys set up starts up down the street, she nods toward the bleachers and says she’s got a cooler of cold drink stashed under one of the seats, and he follows her without even thinking about it.
They sit shoulder to shoulder on the splintered wood bleachers the whole game, their knees pressed together the entire time, the rough denim of her jeans rubbing against his. Halfway through the third inning, she pulls a crumpled paper bag out of her purse, hands him a beignet still warm enough that the powdered sugar melts a little when he picks it up, her fingers lingering on his for three beats too long when he takes it. It tastes like sugar and fried dough and something warm, something he’d forgotten existed. He admits out loud, quiet enough only she can hear, that he hasn’t wanted to sit and talk to someone this much in seven years, that he’d hidden behind his work so long he forgot what it felt like to not be alone. She laughs soft, leans in so her breath brushes his ear when she says she noticed him hiding by the pine tree when he first showed up, could tell he was the kind of guy who runs from easy things just so he doesn’t have to admit he wants them.
After the game, he pulls the kid aside, tells him he’s got a spot at the Astros low-A affiliate camp next month, hands him his card with his cell number scrawled on the back. He walks her to her beat-up silver Tacoma parked at the edge of the field, the sun dipping low over the oak trees, painting the sky pink and orange. She leans in first, kisses his cheek soft, then his mouth, and he tastes sweet tea and sugar on her lips, and he doesn’t pull away, doesn’t overthink it, just wraps one hand around her waist for half a second before she pulls back. She writes her cell number on a napkin from her beignet shop, shoves it in the pocket of his flannel, tells him to stop by before he leaves town the next morning, she’ll have a whole order of beignets waiting for him, extra powdered sugar. He tucks the crumpled paper beignet bag into his scouting notebook, the powdered sugar dusting the pages where he’d written the kid’s fastball velocity, and grins so wide his jaw aches for the first time in half a decade.
