Moe Korczak, 53, has been the equipment manager for the Asheville Tourists Single-A baseball team for 22 years, and he’s had the same end stool at Mac’s Dugout Bar every Wednesday night for 18 of those. His routine doesn’t waver: draft IPA, pork tenderloin sandwich with extra pickles, ignore the trivia night chaos, leave by 9pm to get up for 6am batting practice. The only crack in that routine came six years prior, when his wife died of a sudden heart attack in the middle of a game he was working, and for three months after that he didn’t leave his house outside of work hours. He still carries a tattered photo of her from their first Tourists date in the inside pocket of his work jacket, tucked between a spare glove lace and a pack of sunflower seeds.
The bar is packed the Wednesday in early April he notices her, all the stools taken save the one next to his, and she slides onto it without asking, setting a seltzer with lime down on the sticky linoleum. She’s wearing a faded Tourists hoodie with a coffee stain on the cuff, chipped pale green nail polish, and a silver ring with a tiny baseball embedded in the band twists around her index finger when she leans forward to watch the trivia host yell about 90s power hitters. Moe tenses up, ready to brush off any small talk, but then she reaches for her seltzer at the same time he reaches for his beer, their knuckles brushing, hers cold enough that he yanks his hand back like he touched a hot stove. She huffs a quiet laugh, not mocking, and says “Sorry, I’m all thumbs tonight.”
He nods, goes back to staring at his beer, but then she says she found a 1987 Topps Cal Ripken Jr card tucked inside a copy of *Slaughterhouse-Five* donated to the library she runs downtown last week, and he can’t help but respond. He’s got a collection of 4000+ baseball cards stowed in plastic bins in his basement, untouched since his wife died, and he finds himself rambling about the time he waited three hours outside a mall in Greensboro to get Ripken’s autograph when he was 16. He stops halfway, embarrassed, like he’s oversharing, but she leans in closer, her shoulder pressing against the flannel of his shirt, and asks him to keep going.
The twist of guilt hits him when she mentions her dad was Tom Hale, his old high school baseball coach, the guy who taught him how to re-lace gloves and wrap bats when he didn’t make varsity, the guy he still brings a can of cheap Pabst to once a month at the cemetery. He’d only seen her a handful of times before, a gawky 12 year old selling lemonade at summer practice, and suddenly talking to her like this feels like crossing a line, like coach would yell at him from the dugout if he saw. He pulls back a fraction, but she says her dad talked about him all the time, called him the hardest worker he ever coached, that she recognized him the second she walked in the bar, had been too nervous to say hi at her dad’s memorial three months prior.
The room feels warmer, all of a sudden, the sound of the trivia crowd fading to background noise. He can smell lavender and peppermint on her breath when she talks, can feel the heat of her arm through his shirt, and he hasn’t felt this seen, this interested in another person, in six years. He fights the urge to shut down, to make an excuse and leave, but she says she has tickets to the Tourists home opener the next Friday, behind the dugout, and asks if he can get her a signed ball from the 19 year old shortstop everyone’s been raving about. He says yes before he thinks about it, and then she leans in even closer, her mouth almost to his ear, and says she was also wondering if he’d want to get barbecue after the game, just the two of them, no crowds, no trivia hosts yelling.
He freezes for a full three seconds, can hear his pulse thudding in his ears, the guilt warring with the quiet, sharp spark of excitement he thought he’d lost forever. He says he’d like that, quiet enough that he’s not sure she hears, but she grins, wide, and her hand lands on his forearm, stays there, warm and steady, even through the flannel.
Her friend texts her 20 minutes later, says her 7 year old has a fever and needs a ride to the urgent care, so she grabs her bag off the floor, scribbles her number on a crumpled napkin with a ballpoint pen she pulls from her hoodie pocket, and slides it across the bar. Their fingertips brush when he picks it up, and this time he doesn’t yank away, lingers just for a second, before he tucks it into the inside pocket of his jacket, right next to the photo of his wife. She waves over her shoulder as she pushes out the bar door, and he sits there for another 10 minutes, finishing his beer, ignoring the guy next to him trying to ask for trivia help.
He pays his tab, walks out to his beat-up 2008 Ford F-150, the April air cool enough that he can see his breath when he exhales. He pulls out his flip phone, the same one he’s had for 10 years, punches in her number slow, and sends a text that says “First pitch next Friday is 7pm. I’ll have that signed shortstop ball waiting for you, and I reserved a table at Smokey’s for 9:30.” He shoves the phone back in his jeans pocket, climbs into the truck, turns the key, and the first sound that blares out of the rusted speakers is Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues,” the exact same song that was playing when she sat down next to him.
