Ray Mendez, 53, pushes through the screen door of the Tin Lizard Bar at 10:17 p.m., the July heat sticking to the back of his neck like a wet post-it note. He’s a minor league scout for the Rangers’ Double-A affiliate, spends 40 weeks a year on the road bouncing between small-town ballparks, and he’s been stopping at this exact spot outside Ardmore, Oklahoma, every other week for six years. He has a scar across his left eyebrow from a stray batting practice line drive last spring, and a flaw he doesn’t talk about: seven years prior, his wife left him for a high school athletic director while he was on a three-week scouting trip through the Midwest, and he’s deliberately avoided even the hint of romance ever since, convinced he was too set in his rickety, work-obsessed ways to let anyone in.
He grabs his usual end stool, nods at the bartender, orders a Shiner Bock, and spreads his crumpled scouting notes across the sticky linoleum counter. The AC is half broken, humming so loud it drowns out the jukebox half the time, and the air smells like fried pickles and burnt popcorn and cold beer. He’s scribbling a note about the 17-year-old catcher who hit a seventh-inning grand slam that afternoon when he feels eyes on him. He looks up, and 10 stools down, she’s leaning back against the bar, frozen margarita in one hand, the other twisting a strand of sun-bleached blonde hair around her finger. He recognizes her immediately: Lila, the ex-wife of the local high school head baseball coach, a guy he’s shared post-game beers with four or five times a year for the past half decade. She’s 12 years younger than him, and he’s always written her off as off limits, not just because of her ex, but because he’d convinced himself he didn’t have room for that kind of mess.
She smirks when he catches her staring, lifts her margarita in a tiny toast, and he flushes, looking back down at his notes like they hold the secrets to the universe. Ten minutes later, the stool next to him scrapes against the linoleum, and she sits down, the hem of her cutoff denim shorts brushing his knee for half a second before she shifts away. “You’re the scout that’s always taking notes in the dugout, right?” she says, and her voice is lower than he expected, a little rough from yelling at the game earlier. “That catcher you were watching? That’s my kid, Javi.”
He blinks, nods, leans in to talk over the AC hum, and his shoulder brushes hers. He can smell coconut sunscreen and lime on her skin, and his throat goes a little dry. They talk for an hour, about Javi’s swing, about the terrible umpiring that afternoon, about how the Tin Lizard’s fried pickles are the only thing worth driving 20 miles for in this part of the state. Every time she reaches for her drink, her bare arm brushes his, and the cold from her frosted margarita glass seeps through the thin cotton of his work shirt, sending a jolt up his spine. She holds eye contact longer than she needs to, leaning in so close he can see the faint smattering of freckles across her nose, and when he makes a dumb joke about the league’s obsession with launch angle, she laughs so hard she snorts, clapping a hand over her mouth like she’s embarrassed. He’s torn in half: part of him is screaming that this is a terrible idea, that her ex will find out, that he’s going to get his heart broken again if he lets this go any further, that he’s too old for this kind of stupid, giddy thrill. The other part of him can’t stop staring at the line of salt on her wrist, can’t stop thinking about how long it’s been since someone looked at him like he’s more than just a guy with a notebook and a beat-up pickup truck.
Last call gets announced at 11:45, and fat raindrops start slamming against the windows, so hard the whole building rattles a little. “I walked here,” she says, biting her lip, looking out at the rain. “My place is six blocks away, I don’t think I want to run through that.” He offers to drive her before he can think better of it, and she grins, grabbing her purse off the bar. His truck smells like old baseball gloves and fast food wrappers, and the wipers are on full blast as he drives the slow route to her house, the rain drumming so loud on the roof they barely talk the whole way. When he pulls up to her porch, she doesn’t reach for the door handle right away. She turns to him, her hand resting light on his thigh, and says she’s seen him at games for months, wanted to come talk to him a dozen times, but always got nervous he’d brush her off.
He hesitates for two full seconds, the voice in his head screaming to bolt, before he leans in and kisses her. She tastes like salt and lime and the maraschino cherry she’d sucked off the top of her margarita, and her hand comes up to the back of his neck, her fingers tangling in the short, graying hair at his nape. He can feel the sunburn on her shoulder under his palm, warm and soft, and for the first time in seven years, he doesn’t overthink it. He follows her up the porch steps, into her house, the rain still pouring outside.
He wakes up at 6 a.m. to the smell of dark roast coffee drifting through the open bedroom window. Javi’s at her sister’s for the weekend, she’d told him the night before, so the house is quiet, save for the sound of a cardinal chirping in the oak tree in her front yard. He pulls on his jeans from the night before, walks out onto the porch, and she’s sitting on the swing in an oversized Texas Rangers flannel, holding two mugs of coffee. She hands him one, the ceramic warm against his palms, and he sits down next to her, watching the sun bleed pink and orange over the horizon. He picks up his scouting notebook off the porch rail, crosses out the “drive home by 7 a.m.” reminder he’d scribbled the night before, and takes a long sip of coffee.
