Javi Mendez, 57, leans against the scuffed Formica bar of the only drinking spot within 20 miles of the tiny North Carolina mountain town he’s working in this week. A minor league scout for the Appalachian League, he’s spent three hours scribbling pitch speeds and swing mechanics into the beat-up leather notebook he’s carried since 2008, his left knee bouncing from lukewarm cheap lager and the thrill of finding a left-handed high school pitcher who can throw a 92 mph slider without straining his rotator cuff. His biggest flaw, carried since his messy 2011 divorce, is a hard rule he refuses to break: no romantic or physical entanglements with anyone connected to the local baseball scenes he works in. The divorce came after he dated a small-town team’s admin for six months, only to find she’d leaked his scouting notes to a rival, so he swore off mixing work and pleasure ever since.
The bar smells like fried pickles and stale pretzel salt, the jukebox spitting out slow Johnny Cash deep cuts between commercials for the local farm supply store. He reaches for the bowl of salted peanuts on the bar at the same time the woman standing next to him does, their elbows knocking hard enough to make a few nuts skitter across the counter. She laughs, a low, warm sound, and wipes a stray peanut shell off the hem of her worn Carhartt overalls. Javi’s first thought is that she smells like pine cleaner and peach lip gloss, the kind his mom used to wear when she’d go out on Saturday nights when he was a kid.
She introduces herself as Mae, owns the hardware store on Main Street, has lived in the town her whole life. She says she noticed him scribbling in his notebook during the high school game earlier that afternoon, figured he was either a scout or a true crime writer casing the town. He smirks, flips open his notebook to show her columns of numbers and messy scribbles about batting stance and release point, and her face lights up. She tells him her late husband was the town’s high school baseball coach for 22 years, that she used to sit next to him in the bleachers with the same kind of notebook, tracking pitch counts so he wouldn’t overwork the kids. Javi knew her husband briefly, when he scouted a shortstop out of the town back in 2013, remembers the guy bringing him a mason jar of homemade peach moonshine after the game.
That’s when the tight little knot of resistance forms in his chest. She’s directly tied to the local baseball ecosystem, exactly the kind of person his rule is meant to keep out. But she leans in when he talks about the lefty pitcher he just scouted, her shoulder brushing his bicep, and he can feel the heat of her skin through his thin worn flannel. She asks how pitch tracking tech has changed scouting over the last 20 years, and when he answers, she doesn’t glance at her phone, doesn’t look over his shoulder for someone more interesting, just holds eye contact, her hazel eyes crinkling when he jokes that half the new scouts can’t tell a slider from a curveball if their job depended on it.
When she drops her napkin on the floor, they both bend down to grab it, their hands brushing, and Javi feels a jolt go up his arm that he hasn’t felt in close to a decade. She tucks a strand of gray-streaked brown hair behind her ear, and smirks like she knows exactly what he’s feeling. The bartender’s busy wiping glasses at the far end of the bar, the last two regulars just stumbled out, and the only sound left is Cash’s voice and the hum of the beer cooler.
She asks him if he wants to come back to her place. She says she has three boxes of her late husband’s old scouting notebooks, filled with notes on area kids going back to the 90s, that he might find them useful for tracking what mechanics hold up long term in the mountain climate. Javi’s first instinct is to say no, to cite his rule, pay his tab and drive back to the generic motel room he’s staying in and fall asleep to old baseball highlights. But he looks at her, at the smudge of grease on her left cheek from fixing a screen door earlier that day, at the way she’s leaning just close enough that he can smell that peach lip gloss again, and he feels the rule he’s clung to for 12 years soften at the edges. He’s spent so long running from any connection that might mess up his work, he forgot how good it feels to talk to someone who gets the weird, obsessive little world of small-town baseball.
He nods, slams back the last sip of his beer, and tosses a 20 on the bar to cover both their tabs. They walk out into the warm August night, crickets chirping so loud they almost drown out a distant ATV rumbling down a dirt road. The pavement is still warm from the day’s heat, seeping through the soles of his scuffed work boots. She tucks her hand into the crook of his arm, and he doesn’t pull away, just adjusts his step so their shoulders bump every few feet as they walk to his beat-up Ford F-150. He holds the passenger door open for her, and when she climbs in, her hand brushes his wrist for half a second, leaving a faint tingle that lingers even after he closes the door.
