Manny Ruiz, 57, has been the equipment manager for the Akron RubberDucks AA minor league team for 22 years. He runs a small booth at the downtown summer street fair every year, selling custom engraved bat handles he carves in his garage on off days, and for 12 straight years he’s barely said two words to any adjacent vendor. He wears a faded 2019 championship hoodie even when the humidity pushes the heat index to 98 degrees, sweat beading at the graying edges of his buzzcut, a faint scar snaking across his left knuckle from a broken bat incident a decade prior. His wedding ring still sits tight on his ring finger, 8 years after his wife Lila died of ovarian cancer, and he’s never so much as grabbed coffee with another woman since, convinced any new connection would be a betrayal. He hates small talk more than he hates 13-inning rain delays.
The woman running the honey booth next to him rolls in at 7 a.m., hauling crates of glass jars in steel-toed boots, cutoff denim shorts, and a frayed Johnny Cash tee. Jo, 52, has a tiny honeybee tattoo peeking out behind her left ear and a smudge of beeswax streaked across her right cheek, and when a gust of wind blows a stack of her paper napkins straight onto his table, she leans over to grab them, her sun-warmed forearm brushing his bare wrist. He catches a whiff of jasmine shampoo and raw clover honey, and she grins when she notices he fumbles a bat handle mid-polish, her front tooth chipped just slightly at the edge. He nods, looks away, feels his ears burn, which is ridiculous—he’s 57, not a 16-year-old kid at his first varsity game.
The day drags slow, him selling engraved handles to dads with starry-eyed Little Leaguers, her passing out honey samples to kids holding sticky cotton candy. He catches himself glancing over every few minutes, watching her laugh as she lets a toddler taste honey off a popsicle stick, and when she catches him staring, she winks. He drops a bat knob on his work boot, swears under his breath, and she snorts loud enough that he hears her over the nearby cover band’s terrible rendition of John Mellencamp. She walks over 10 minutes later with a 4-ounce jar of wildflower honey, shoves it in his hand before he can protest, says it’s for the bruise he’s definitely going to have. Her fingers are calloused, rough from lifting hive boxes, nothing like Lila’s soft piano-playing hands, and he tucks the jar in his hoodie pocket, mumbles a thank you. They end up talking for 20 minutes about her 16-year-old son, who plays left field on the rec league team he volunteered to coach three years prior—he remembers the kid, fast as hell, terrible swing, he gave him a free bat weight back then to fix his follow-through.
The sky goes black out of nowhere at 4 p.m., wind whipping his stack of business cards across the street, rain pouring so hard it stings exposed skin. They scramble in sync to haul their inventory under the narrow awning of the closed laundromat next door, and when he grabs the handle of her 30-pound cooler of raw honey at the same time she does, their hands press together for three full seconds, neither pulling away first. They huddle side by side once everything is safe, their knees pressed tight together under the awning to stay out of the rain, rain drumming so loud on the metal they have to lean in to hear each other talk. The air smells like wet asphalt, cut clover, and her honey, and before he can stop himself he’s talking about Lila, about how she used to drag him to this exact fair every year, how she’d eat three orders of fried Oreos in one sitting and complain about a stomach ache for three days after. He hasn’t said that out loud to anyone in years, feels stupid for oversharing, but she just nods, says her ex husband left her for a 28-year-old barista four years back, that beekeeping was the only thing that stopped her from driving to his new house and releasing a hive of Italian bees in his pickup. He laughs, loud and unplanned, can’t remember the last time he laughed that hard without a twinge of guilt sitting heavy in his chest.
The rain stops as fast as it started, a faint rainbow arching over the downtown skyline, people stepping around puddles as the street fills back up. She wipes a smudge of dirt off his cheek with her thumb, her hand warm and steady, and he doesn’t flinch. She asks if he wants to walk down to the dive bar at the end of the block, grab a beer, split an order of fried Oreos. He hesitates, twists his wedding ring around his finger twice, the way he always does when he’s nervous, thinks about Lila, how she always called him too stubborn for his own good, told him he deserved to be happy even when she wasn’t around to see it.
He says yes, tucks his damp hoodie over his arm, lets her loop her arm through his as they step off the curb to cross the street, her shoulder pressed firm to his, warm even through his soaked t-shirt. She steals a fry off his plate 10 minutes later when they’re sitting at the bar’s sticky Formica counter, and he doesn’t even pretend to be mad about it.
