Manny Ruiz, 52, makes his living as a minor league baseball scout, crisscrossing Ohio, Kentucky, and West Virginia in a dented 2008 Ford F-150 looking for overlooked teen pitchers who throw 90+ mph and don’t have a rap sheet longer than their scouting report. His biggest flaw? He’s spent eight years building walls so high even the most determined local widows can’t scale them, ever since his wife died in a car crash coming home from a visit to her sister. He avoids church potlucks, VFW fish fries, and any other gathering where someone might try to set him up, convinced any romantic connection at his age is just more heartache waiting to happen.
He’s at the Auglaize County Fair on a sweltering July Tuesday, fresh off watching a lanky 17-year-old lefty from Lima throw seven shutout innings, when he feels a shoulder brush his at the beer tent. The plastic cup in his hand sloshes a little, warm IPA dripping onto his scuffed work boots, and he turns to snap at whoever bumped him, then stops. It’s Lila Hale, the woman who moved into the old white farmhouse three quarters of a mile down the road from his place three weeks prior, the one who brought him a plate of still-warm chocolate chip cookies when she and her husband moved in. He’d grunted a thanks, shut the door in her face before she could say more, scared the neighborhood gossip mill would start spinning lies if anyone saw them talking longer than ten seconds.
Now she’s grinning at him, wearing cutoff denim shorts, a faded Johnny Cash tee pulled tight across her shoulders, and scuffed cowboy boots caked in mud at the soles, a far cry from the frilly linen sundress and pearl earrings she’d worn that day she dropped off the cookies. The humidity hangs thick enough to sip, carrying the smell of her coconut sunscreen, fried dough from the concession stand, and the faint, sharp tang of cherry seltzer she’s holding in a plastic cup. “Sorry about that,” she says, nodding at the beer dripping onto his boots. “These crowds are worse than the Kentucky State Fair the year the tractor pull got rained out.”
He snorts, surprised into a laugh he didn’t know he had in him. They start talking, leaning against the splintered wooden rail of the tent, the roar of the Tilt-A-Whirl and the creak of the Ferris wheel fading into background noise. She says her husband, the newly elected county commissioner, is off schmoozing with soybean farmers at the 4-H booth, working the crowd for his re-election campaign two years out already, and she snuck off to get a drink before she had to listen to one more story about crop yields. She married him six months prior, she says, because she thought he was steady, safe, a good bet after a messy breakup with her long-term boyfriend, and turns out he’s just boring, cares more about campaign donation checks than he does about what she wants for dinner, let alone her dream of opening a small plant nursery on the side of their property.
When he tells her about the 17-year-old lefty who tried to sneak his pet ferret into the dugout before the game, she grabs his forearm to steady herself as she laughs, her palm warm and calloused from hauling hay on her family’s farm growing up, the pressure of her fingers seeping right through his thin cotton work shirt. He freezes for half a second, half disgusted with himself for the jolt of heat that shoots up his arm to his chest, half hungry for more, and she must notice, because she doesn’t pull her hand away for three full beats, her dark eyes locked on his, no trace of humor left on her face. The string lights strung across the top of the tent gild the edges of her blonde hair, and he can see the tiny, pale scar on her left cheek, the one she says she got when she was 16 and got thrown off a spooked barrel horse.
They keep talking for another 45 minutes, shifting closer every time a group of fairgoers squeezes past them, their knees brushing now and then, neither of them pulling away. He tells her about his wife, about how he stopped letting people get close because he didn’t want to feel that kind of pain again, and she nods, like she gets it, like she’s carrying her own kind of weight she doesn’t talk about to anyone else. The whole time he’s fighting a war in his head, one side screaming that this is wrong, she’s married, everyone in this town knows who her husband is, the other side screaming that he hasn’t felt this alive in eight years, that he’s tired of hiding in his empty house every night eating frozen dinners and watching old baseball games alone.
When her husband waves at her from across the fairground, she leans in so close he can taste the cherry seltzer on her breath, her lips almost brushing his ear. “He’s leaving for a three-day conference in Columbus tomorrow at 8 a.m.,” she says, voice low enough only he can hear. “If you come over around 6, I’ll make you fried green tomatoes, the kind my grandma taught me to make, and we can watch that old 1990 Reds World Series game you said you have on DVD. No strings attached, if that’s what you want.”
He hesitates for two full seconds, the voices in his head yelling so loud he can barely hear the fair noise around him, then he nods. She grins, pulls a napkin out of her back pocket, scribbles her cell number on it in sparkly purple pen, shoves it into the front pocket of his jeans. She walks off toward her husband, glancing over her shoulder twice, winking both times, before she slips her arm through his and puts on the bright, fake smile he’d seen her wear at the county commissioner swearing-in ceremony last month.
Manny finishes his beer, crumples the empty cup in his hand, walks back to his truck, pulls the napkin out of his pocket, and saves her number in his phone under “Tomatoes” so no one who borrows his truck will accidentally see it. He pulls up his calendar, deletes the scouting trip he had planned for Wednesday evening, no matter how good the pitching prospect from Dayton is supposed to be. He cranks the AC in his F-150, turns up the old George Strait cassette he’s had in the player since 2007, and smiles for the first time in longer than he can remember.
