Javi Mendez shifted his weight in the rib line, plastic cup of Pabst sweating through the napkin wrapped around its middle, sun searing the back of his neck where he’d forgotten to put on sunscreen. At 52, he’d spent 11 years as a minor league baseball scout for the Cincinnati Reds farm system, calluses permanent on his right hand from gripping a radar gun for hours at high school fields across the Midwest. He’d driven six hours from a tournament in Michigan the night before, only sticking around his hometown of Lima, Ohio for the annual Auglaize County Rib Festival because the brisket rub from the southern Indiana vendor hadn’t changed since he was a teen. His only plans after that were to crash in his empty rental house for 12 hours before hitting the road again for a D3 playoff game in Illinois.
A kid darted past him holding a dripping corn dog, and Javi stumbled back, sloshing a quarter of his beer down the front of a woman’s pale linen button-down. He started sputtering apologies, grabbing a handful of napkins from the stack by the line, and froze when he looked up. It was Lena Ruiz, his ex-wife’s younger cousin. He hadn’t seen her since the divorce papers were signed three years prior, when she’d slipped him a quiet “I’m sorry it went that way” in the hallway of the county courthouse before vanishing to Portland for a few years.
She laughed, swatting his hand away gently when he tried to dab at the beer stain on her shirt. “Relax, Javi. It’s just linen, it’ll wash out. You still look like you’re about to pass out when you get caught doing something wrong, huh?” She was closer than she needed to be, shoulder brushing his bicep when she leaned around him to wave at a friend across the food court. She smelled like lavender and the smoked paprika drifting from the rib smokers, sun streaking gold through the loose waves of her dark hair. Javi’s throat went dry. He’d had a stupid, quiet crush on her since his wedding day 17 years prior, when she’d caught him staring from across the dance floor and winked. He’d buried it deep, written it off as a dumb, married man’s mistake, felt guilty every time he’d even thought about it for nearly two decades.
He tried to make small talk, awkward at first, asking about the plant shop she’d opened the year prior when she’d moved back to Lima to take care of her mom. She asked about the left-handed pitcher from Kent State he’d written a scouting report on that went semi-viral on baseball TikTok, said she’d followed it because she’d always loved listening to him ramble about pitching mechanics at family cookouts, even when everyone else had tuned him out. She touched his forearm when he told the story about the 17-year-old kid who’d thrown a no-hitter the week before, 24 hours after his old labrador had to be put down. The warmth of her palm seeped through the thin flannel of his shirt, and Javi couldn’t remember the last time someone had touched him like that—no agenda, no obligation, just soft curiosity.
They sat on a weathered cedar bench half a mile from the festival, the music faint enough to just be background hum, crickets starting to chirp in the tall grass along the bank. She leaned back, her leg pressing fully against his, denim of her jeans warm from the sun, and didn’t pull away. “I saw you staring at me at your wedding, you know,” she said, quiet enough that he almost didn’t hear it over the river running past. “I thought I was imagining it, until you avoided me at every family event for 14 years after that.” Javi’s face went hot. He’d thought he’d hidden that so well. He opened his mouth to apologize, to make some dumb excuse, and she leaned in, her hand coming up to rest on the side of his neck, thumb brushing the edge of his jaw. He kissed her before he could talk himself out of it, slow, her lip gloss tasting like peach seltzer and the cherry lollipop she’d been sucking on earlier. It didn’t feel messy, or wrong, like he’d expected. It felt like something he’d been waiting for for longer than he cared to admit.
They pulled away when a group of teens on bikes yelled as they rode past, laughing. She scribbled her phone number on the back of the scouting report sticking out of his back pocket, the edge of the paper smudged with rib sauce. “Text me when you get back from that game in Illinois,” she said, standing up, brushing grass off her jeans. “We can get pancakes at that diner on Main you used to love. I hear they still make the blueberry compote from scratch.” He nodded, watching her walk to her beat-up Subaru, waving when she glanced over her shoulder before getting in. He looked down at the scrawled number on the edge of his scouting report, thumb brushing the faint smudge of cherry lip gloss she’d left on the corner of the page when she handed it back.
