Manny Ruiz, 51, has spent most of the last four years living out of his beat-up 2018 Ford F-150, scouting high school and JUCO baseball prospects for a Low-A Charleston minor league team. His only steady companion on the road is a cooler of cheap beer and a stack of scouting reports, and when he’s home in his tiny Asheville cottage, he avoids local events like the plague. Pitying small talk about his late wife, who dropped dead of a stroke on their 22nd anniversary, makes his jaw tight enough to crack a tooth, so he’d skipped the annual town BBQ cookoff three years running before his neighbor cornered him on his porch and begged him to judge the rib category, claiming no one knew smoked meat better than a guy who eats half his meals out of a camp grill on the side of I-85.
He showed up 10 minutes late, wearing a faded Braves cap and a flannel shirt dotted with pine sap from the previous weekend’s deer hunt, and stopped short when he saw who was sitting in the folding chair next to his assigned spot. Lila Marquez, 48, his cousin’s ex-wife, who he’d had a quiet, stupid crush on since he was 22, when she danced with him at her wedding reception because his then-fiancée was stuck home with a bad flu. She’d moved back to Asheville two years prior, after the divorce, to open a small houseplant shop downtown, and he’d gone out of his way to avoid running into her, too—some old, unspoken rule about not messing with family’s exes had been drilled into his head since he was a kid growing up in a crowded Miami Cuban household.
The folding chairs were crammed so close together their elbows brushed when they both reached for paper plates at the same time. Manny pulled his arm back fast like he’d touched a hot grill, and Lila laughed, a low, throaty sound he remembered clear as day. “Relax, Ruiz,” she said, twisting a silver hoop earring between her thumb and forefinger. “I don’t bite unless you ask real nice.” His ears went pink, and he stared down at the first tray of ribs set in front of them, so flustered he forgot to take notes for the first 30 seconds.
They spent the next two hours bickering quietly over entries, making fun of the rib batch that tasted like someone dumped a whole bottle of liquid smoke into the rub, and debating whether vinegar-based sauce was a crime against barbecue. When he cracked a joke about one dry rib tasting like the sole of his work boot, Lila snort-laughed so hard she spilled a little IPA down her front, leaned over to slap his arm, and left her hand resting on his bicep for three full seconds. He could feel the callus on her palm from repotting cacti and monstera leaves, the warmth seeping through the thin flannel, and his throat went dry. Half of him was screaming that this was wrong, that half the town knew who she was, that his cousin would lose his mind if he found out they were even talking. The other half couldn’t stop staring at the smudge of charcoal on her jaw, the way her sun-streaked brown hair fell over her shoulder when she leaned down to mark a score on her sheet, the faint smell of jasmine perfume mixed with wood smoke that clung to her shirt.
After judging wrapped, they snuck off to the beer tent to grab fresh drinks, and avoided the rowdy crowd by slipping behind the big oak tree at the edge of the fairground. The sun was dipping low, painting the sky pink and tangerine, and crickets were starting to chirp in the tall grass at their feet. Lila leaned back against the tree, took a sip of her beer, and said she’d been wanting to say hi to him for months, had seen his truck parked outside his cottage when she drove by on her way to the nursery, had been nervous he’d brush her off. She told him her ex had been a selfish drunk who never cared that she wanted to open her own shop, that Manny was always the nice one in the family, the one who’d brought her soup when she had COVID in 2021 even though he’d barely spoken two words to her before that.
Manny stared at her for a long second, then reached up and brushed the charcoal smudge off her jaw with his thumb. She didn’t pull away. She leaned into the touch, just a little, and their faces were six inches apart, close enough he could smell the peach iced tea she’d been drinking earlier mixed with the hop fumes of her beer. He didn’t overthink it. He asked her if she wanted to come over to his place later, that he had a peach pie his wife had frozen the week before she died, stashed in the back of his freezer, that it was too sweet to eat alone.
Lila grinned, the corners of her eyes crinkling, and said she’d bring the little barrel cactus she’d been growing for him, the kind that only needed water once a month, perfect for a guy who was on the road 10 months out of the year. She scribbled her cell number on the back of his crumpled scouting sheet, pressed it into his palm, and her fingers lingered on his for a beat before she pulled away. He stood there leaning against the tree, watching her walk back to her beat-up Subaru, her work boots kicking up little puffs of red clay dust as she went, and didn’t even notice when his neighbor walked over to slap him on the back and ask if the judging had gone okay.
