Manny Ruiz, 53, makes his living driving 40,000 miles a year chasing 19-year-old kids who can throw 95 mph but can’t remember to cover first base. He’s a minor league scout for the Pittsburgh Pirates, carries a water-stained scorebook in the passenger seat of his 2018 Ford F-150, and hasn’t let anyone sit that close to him in 8 years, not since his ex-wife left a note on the kitchen counter and a forwarding address in Chicago while he was on a 10-day trip through the Texas panhandle. His biggest flaw is he’d rather judge a kid’s swing for three hours than make small talk with a stranger for three minutes, and he’s perfectly fine with that, or so he tells himself.
He’s camped at the corner stool of a dive bar outside Athens, Ohio, 10 PM on a sticky July Tuesday, fresh off scouting a lefty pitcher at Ohio University who might be worth a 12th round pick next spring. The bar smells like fried dill pickles and old pine, the jukebox is spitting out Merle Haggard deep cuts, and the bourbon he’s nursing burns just right going down, takes the edge off the knee pain he still gets from blowing out his ACL senior year of high school.
She sits two stools down at first, wears a crisp linen blouse that’s a little too nice for this bar, gold hoop earrings, a faint tan from playing tennis earlier that day. He pegs her as the mayor’s wife before she even opens her mouth—everyone in this town has a sticker of his face on their bumper, and her photo was in the local paper he grabbed at the gas station that morning, smiling next to him at a park ribbon cutting. She orders a vodka soda, twists the lime so hard the juice runs down her wrist, and when she reaches for a napkin, the guy carrying a tray of hot wings squeezes past her, knocks her arm, and she spills half her drink across the cuff of Manny’s scouting jacket, the one stitched with his name on the left chest.
“Shit, I am so sorry,” she says, leaning across the empty stool between them to dab at the wet fabric with her napkin. Her knee brushes his when she leans in, warm through the denim of his jeans, and he catches the scent of coconut sunscreen and peppermint lip balm, a far cry from the gas station coffee and old baseball glove smell he’s been surrounded by for weeks. She holds eye contact for two beats longer than polite, her thumb brushing the edge of the embroidery on his jacket before she pulls back, sitting on the stool right next to him now that the guy with the wings is gone.
He waves off her apology, orders her another drink, lets her flip through his scorebook when she asks what the scribbles in the margins mean. She laughs when he explains the little X next to the pitcher’s name is for when he threw a fastball straight into the opposing team’s dugout and hit the coach in the shoulder. She leans in so close when he talks that her hair brushes his forearm, and he doesn’t pull away, which surprises him more than it should. He learns her husband is at a campaign fundraiser in Cleveland tonight, that she’s spent the last six months smiling for photos and lying to people about how happy their marriage is, that she found a pair of thong underwear in the back of his SUV last week that aren’t hers.
He wants to make an excuse to leave, to tell her he has an early drive to Cincinnati tomorrow, that he doesn’t do this, doesn’t get tangled up with people who have lives in the towns he passes through. But when she rests her hand on his arm for half a second, her silver bracelet clinking soft against the metal of his watch, he doesn’t have it in him to lie. He asks her if she wants to go sit out at the college baseball field he was at earlier, that the lights are usually on until midnight for the adult rec league, that the view of the rolling hills from the parking lot is better than anything in this bar.
She says yes before he finishes the sentence.
They drive out there with the windows down, the air thick with the smell of clover and freshly cut grass, crickets chirping loud enough to hear over the old Johnny Cash playing on the radio. He parks at the edge of the lot, climbs into the bed of the truck, pulls her up next to him. The field is empty now, the overhead lights casting soft gold over the infield dirt, and a group of college kids are playing cornhole in the parking lot down the way, laughing so loud it carries over to them. She leans her head on his shoulder, and he doesn’t stiffen up, doesn’t run through all the reasons this is a bad idea, all the ways it could end with him hurt again.
He tells her about his ex-wife, about the note she left, about how he’s spent 8 years running from any conversation that doesn’t involve batting averages or pitch speeds. She tells him she hasn’t felt like anyone has actually listened to her talk since before her husband announced he was running for mayor three years ago. They don’t kiss, not yet, don’t rush anything. He passes her the half-empty bottle of bourbon he keeps under the truck seat, and she takes a sip, makes a face, and passes it back.
The lights on the field cut out at 12:15 AM, just like he said they would. The sky is clear, full of stars you can’t see in the city, and the only sound left is the crickets and the faint hum of a car driving down the main road a mile away. She laces her fingers through his, his calloused, scarred hand from years of swinging bats and turning wrenches on his old truck, soft against her palm. He doesn’t make up an excuse to leave early, doesn’t start talking about his drive tomorrow. He just sits there, holding her hand, watching the stars blink slow over the dark hills.
