Ray Voss, 53, is a minor league baseball scout who spends 300 days a year crisscrossing Ohio, Kentucky, and West Virginia in a dented 2017 F150 with a stack of radar guns in the passenger seat and a cooler of cheap lager in the back. His biggest flaw, the one his sister nags him about every Thanksgiving, is that he’s held a petty, unshakable grudge against his ex-wife since their 2011 divorce, to the point he’d skipped the annual New Concord summer rib cookoff — an event he’d won three years running before the split — rather than cross paths with her, since she ran the planning committee. He only caved this year because his 19-year-old nephew, a culinary student at Cincinnati State, begged him to enter, saying the dry rub he’d been tinkering with for six months needed a real test, not just the half-hearted praise of his drunk college roommates.
The July air is thick with hickory smoke, fried onion fumes, and the tinny twang of a local country cover band playing off a makeshift stage by the park pavilion when he shows up at 7 a.m. to set up his beat-up offset smoker. He’s halfway through his second beer by 2 p.m., watching a group of kids chase a brindle stray dog through the loose gravel, when he sees her. Lila Marlow, his ex-wife’s younger cousin, 48, who moved back to town three months prior after leaving a 15-year marriage to a construction foreman who’d cheated on her with his secretary. Ray hasn’t seen her since the divorce, but he remembers her from family cookouts back when he was still married — quiet, quick to laugh, used to bring her litter of rescue beagles to the little league games he coached in the off-season, always had a pocket full of peanut butter treats for the dogs that wandered the fields.
She’s carrying a stack of paper plates and a Tupperware of peach cobbler, her white canvas sneakers catching on a loose chunk of limestone, and she stumbles forward right into his orbit. He reaches out without thinking, his calloused hand (rough from decades of gripping baseball bats, turning radar gun dials, and hauling smoker racks) wrapping around her elbow to steady her, and he can feel the warmth of her skin through the thin floral cotton of her sundress. She smells like vanilla lotion and wood smoke, a stray strand of chestnut hair sticking to the sweat on the back of her neck, her hazel eyes crinkling at the corners when she grins up at him. “Knew you’d cave eventually,” she says, nodding at the smoker billowing pale gray smoke behind him. “Your ribs were the only reason I even came to these things back in the day. Ex would drag me, I’d eat three plates of yours and dip before the awards.”
Ray’s first instinct is to step back, to make some half-assed excuse about checking his meat and bolt to the other side of the park before his ex sees them. He knows how his ex talks about him, paints him as a selfish drifter who chose chasing 19-year-old pitchers over a quiet, picket-fence life, and she’d lose her mind if she saw him chatting up her younger cousin. But Lila doesn’t step away. She leans in, close enough that he can smell the spearmint gum she’s chewing when she asks about his scouting trips, remembers he used to stop at tiny, clapboard general stores across the state to hunt for 1970s Cincinnati Reds vintage cards for his collection. He’s shocked she remembers that detail, something he hadn’t mentioned to anyone but his nephew in years.
Their hands brush when she passes him a chipped plastic fork and a warm, syrupy slice of cobbler, her knuckles grazing his for half a second, and he can’t stop staring at the faint freckles across the back of her hand when he takes it. The cobbler is sweet, the peaches ripe and warm, still oozing juice, and he swears he can still feel the ghost of her touch on his skin when he walks back to his smoker to flip the racks of ribs an hour later. He catches her staring at him from across the park a little while after that, when he’s wiping sweat off his forehead with the back of his dirt-streaked hand, and she doesn’t look away when he meets her eye, just lifts her can of lime seltzer in a quiet toast.
The conflict hits when his ex-wife storms over to his booth an hour before the awards are announced, her jaw tight enough to crack a peanut, and says Lila is “off limits” and he needs to leave her alone before he “messes up another good thing for someone.” Ray feels the old, hot anger rise up, the same anger he’s carried in his chest for 12 years, but before he can snap back, Lila steps up beside him, her shoulder pressing lightly against his arm, the soft fabric of her dress brushing his bare bicep. “I’m a grown woman,” she says, her voice steady, no tremor in it, “I can talk to whoever I want. You don’t get to police my social life.”
The climax is when Ray wraps his arm around Lila’s waist, his hand resting lightly on her hip, and tells his ex he’s not leaving, that he’s staying for the awards, and then he’s taking Lila to the 24-hour diner downtown for chocolate milkshakes and fries after. His ex sputters for a second, face turning bright red, then turns and storms off toward the pavilion, and Ray doesn’t even feel a twinge of the old guilt he used to get when they fought. He looks down at Lila, and she’s grinning, her hand coming up to rest on the back of his where it’s still on her hip, her fingers curling around his.
He wins first place in the pork rib category 45 minutes later, the small crowd cheering when the emcee calls his name, clapping him on the back as he walks up to the stage. Lila hands him the crinkly blue ribbon, their fingers lacing together for a slow beat when he takes it from her, and he can feel his face heat up like a 16-year-old asking a girl to prom for the first time.
Later, they’re sitting on the hood of his dented F150 parked at the edge of the park, sharing the last of the cobbler and listening to the band play a slow, gritty cover of Johnny Cash’s Folsom Prison Blues. The sun is setting pink and tangerine over the oak tree line, the air cooling off just enough that he can wrap his faded, smoke-scented flannel shirt around her shoulders without her protesting. He licks a smudge of peach filling off her lower lip, and for the first time in 12 years, he doesn’t feel the urge to get back on the road at dawn.
