Rafe Marquez, 53, has spent the last 18 years crisscrossing Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky as a minor league baseball scout, logging 40,000 miles a year in his dented 2017 F150, eating most meals out of a cooler, and sleeping in cheap motel rooms where the TV only gets three channels. His biggest flaw, one he’ll laugh off if pressed but won’t deny, is that he holds grudges like an infielder clutches a game-winning fly ball: tight, unrelenting, no intention of letting go. For 12 years, that grudge has kept him away from the town’s annual summer street fair, the same event where his ex-wife announced she was leaving him for the cocky real estate developer who just got elected mayor last fall. This year, his little sister threatened to hide all his vintage scouting scorecards if he didn’t show up to man the youth baseball sign-up booth, so he caved.
The July air sticks to his skin like wet newspaper, thick with the smell of fried Oreos, cut fescue, and the diesel fumes from the tractor pull set up at the far end of the street. He’s halfway through handing a stack of flyers to a harried mom with two kids clinging to her legs when Lena Carter steps up to the booth, and he freezes. She’s the mayor’s wife, 15 years his junior, always in the background at town meetings, quiet, wearing the kind of modest dresses that look like they were picked out for her by the mayor’s campaign manager. Today she’s in a light blue sundress, no shoes, toenails painted pale pink, a smudge of cotton candy on her left cheek.
He’s ready to be cold, to brush her off the way he brushes off anyone tied to the mayor, but she leans against the booth’s wooden edge, tilts her head, and says she’s been trying to find him for three weeks to ask about signing her 10-year-old nephew up for the fall travel team. Her voice is low, a little rough, like she smokes when no one’s watching, and when a particularly loud roar goes up from the tractor pull, she leans in so close her shoulder presses against his bicep, the fabric of her dress thin enough that he can feel the heat of her skin through his faded team t-shirt. He catches a whiff of coconut sunscreen and the faint, sweet tang of peach iced tea on her breath, and for a second he forgets how to form words.
They talk for 20 minutes, their hands brushing every time they pass a flyer back and forth, every time she reaches for the cold lemonade he set on the booth edge beside his own. He learns she hates the mayor’s campaign events, that he’s been cheating on her with his former campaign manager for six months, that she’s only staying until the end of the year so her little sister can finish her senior year of high school living in the mayor’s house rent free. He tells her about the time he scouted a kid from rural Kentucky who threw a 95 mile an hour fastball but showed up to the tryout barefoot because he couldn’t afford cleats. She laughs so hard she snorts, and he finds himself grinning, the tight knot of anger he’s carried in his chest for 12 years loosening just a little.
A crack of thunder splits the sky out of nowhere, and the sky opens up, fat, warm raindrops slamming into the asphalt so hard they kick up clouds of dust that smells like wet concrete. People scatter, screaming, grabbing coolers and blankets and running for cover under store awnings. Rafe grabs the stack of flyers off the booth, grabs Lena’s wrist before she can run off in the wrong direction, and yanks her toward his truck parked two spots down, yanking the canvas tarp he keeps in the bed for rain delays at tryouts out and flinging it over both of them before they climb into the bed, squeezed tight between his cooler and a stack of folding chairs.
The rain pounds so hard on the tarp that the rest of the world goes quiet, just the steady thrum of water and the sound of both of them breathing hard, their shoulders pressed together, their knees bumping every time the truck shifts a little under the weight of the rain. She looks up at him, her eyes dark, her hair sticking to her forehead, and she admits she’s been sitting in the stands at the town league games for two months, watching him coach the 12-year-old all star team, that she used to drive past his little house on the edge of town just to see if his truck was parked out front. He doesn’t think, just lifts a hand and brushes the cotton candy smudge off her cheek, his thumb lingering on her jaw for a beat, and when she doesn’t pull away, he leans in and kisses her, slow, soft, no urgency, just the quiet hum of want that’s been building in his chest since she first walked up to the booth.
Ten minutes later the rain lets up, the sun poking through the clouds, painting the street pink and gold. She climbs out of the truck bed first, adjusting her dress, and before she turns to leave, she slips a folded white napkin into the pocket of his cargo shorts, her fingers brushing his thigh through the fabric. He waits until she’s halfway down the street, waving at a group of campaign volunteers, before he pulls the napkin out, sees her cell number scrawled in dark blue ink across it, with a little drawing of a baseball in the corner. He reaches into his wallet, pulls out the crumpled photo of his ex-wife he’s carried around since the day she left, wads it up, and tosses it into the half-empty lemonade cup sitting on the curb beside his truck.
