Moe Rainer, 59, has spent the last 22 years crisscrossing small-town Midwest parking lots, folding metal bleachers, and sticky dive bars for his job as a Class A minor league scout for the St. Louis Cardinals farm system. His only consistent companion for most of that stretch, after his wife Lynn died of ovarian cancer in 2015, has been a beat-up leather-bound scouting notebook, a cooler of cheap beer, and a running list of gripes about modern pitching mechanics. He’s stubborn to a fault, has turned down every blind date his sister has set up for him, and insists he’s “too busy chasing kids with good arms” for nonsense like casual connection.
That night he’s parked at the scuffed Formica bar of The Slider, a hole-in-the-wall three blocks from the stadium in Marion, Illinois, rain hammering the tin roof loud enough to drown out the NASCAR replay on the TV above the taps. He’s halfway through a draft of Pabst, scribbling notes about a 19-year-old lefty from Carbondale who can throw a slider that breaks so sharp it makes batters look like they’re tripping over their own feet, when someone sets a fresh paper napkin down next to his fry basket.
He looks up. It’s not the regular bartender, a guy named Earl who’s got a tattoo of a cardinal on his neck. It’s a woman with silver streaks in her dark hair, cut short just above her jaw, wearing a faded Reds hoodie and jeans with paint splatters on the knee. She’s wiping down the bar with a rag that smells like pine cleaner and lemon, and when she meets his eye, she smirks, nodding at his notebook. “Earl said you’re the scout who’s been hanging around all week. Used to shoot those games for the Cincinnati Enquirer, back in the 2000s. Spent more nights in bleachers just like those than I can count.”
Her elbow brushes his when she leans past him to grab an empty beer bottle from the seat next to him, and he feels a jolt go up his arm that has nothing to do with static from the old bar carpet. He tenses up, first instinct to shut down, tell her thanks but he’s busy, but then he catches the edge of a scar on her left wrist, the exact kind you get from slamming a camera lens into a metal bleacher rail, and he relaxes a little. “Lefty tonight worth writing home about?” she asks, leaning against the bar across from him, her hip propped on the edge, close enough that he can smell the lavender in her shampoo over the smell of fried onions and stale beer.
He talks for 10 minutes straight about the kid’s mechanics, his release point, the way he holds his glove just a hair too high when he’s winding up, and she nods along, asks the right questions, doesn’t pretend to know more than she does, doesn’t glaze over like most people do when he starts talking scouting. When they both reach for the salted peanut bowl Earl set between them halfway through his rant, their knuckles brush, and she doesn’t pull away immediately. Her skin is warm, calloused at the knuckles, just like he figured it would be.
He’s fighting with himself the whole time. Part of him feels like he’s doing something wrong, like Lynn is watching, rolling her eyes at him for being an idiot for closing himself off for 8 years, the other part is screaming that he doesn’t deserve to feel this light, this seen, after so long of just going through the motions. The rain slows to a drizzle, the last of the regulars filter out, Earl locks the front door and heads home, says he’ll leave the back open for her to lock up when she’s done.
He asks her if she wants to split a slice of the peach pie Earl keeps in the cooler behind the bar, the one with the crumb top. She says yes, and they move to a booth in the back, the vinyl cracked and sticky with old soda, the jukebox in the corner playing a Johnny Cash deep cut he hasn’t heard since he and Lynn went to a show in Memphis on their 10th anniversary. She tells him her name is Jules, she’s in town helping her aunt run the bar while her mom recovers from a total knee replacement, she got divorced 3 years ago after her ex-husband decided he’d rather chase 20-year-old groupies at country concerts than stay married. He tells her about Lynn, about how he thought he’d never care about talking to anyone that wasn’t a coach or a 19-year-old pitcher ever again.
They sit there for an hour, not talking much after that, just listening to the rain tap on the window, passing the pie plate back and forth. She reaches across the table at one point, brushes a crumb off the edge of his flannel shirt, and her hand lingers on his shoulder for a second, heavy and warm. He doesn’t pull away. He asks her if she wants to come to the doubleheader tomorrow, says he can get her a pass for the press box, she can bring her old camera if she wants. She grins, says she’ll even bring the good homemade peanut butter cookies she baked last night.
He walks her to her car, a beat-up 2012 Subaru Outback with a Reds bumper sticker on the back, parked behind the bar. It’s still drizzling, so he gives her his old Cardinals windbreaker, the one with the frayed cuffs he’s had since 2012. She puts it on, it’s too big for her, sleeves hanging past her wrists, and she leans up and kisses him on the cheek, soft, her lips warm even through the cold rain on his skin. “I’ll see you at 11,” she says, climbing into the driver’s seat. He stands there until her taillights turn the corner at the end of the block, the rain soaking through the collar of his flannel.
He tucks the napkin she scribbled her cell number on into the front pocket of his scouting notebook, right next to the scouting report for the left-handed pitcher, and smiles for the first time in months that isn’t about a well-thrown curveball.
