Manny Ruiz, 53, has spent 26 years as a minor league baseball scout, logging 40,000 miles a year in his dented silver Ford F-150, subsisting on gas station hot dogs and cheap Pabst, and holding a grudge against Lena Marlow so long it’s become as familiar as the scar across his left knuckle from patching a flat on a muddy backroad outside Toledo in 2020. His worst flaw, the one his sister yells at him for every Thanksgiving, is he’d rather nurse resentment for decades than ask a single question that might make him look stupid. He’d skipped every high school reunion until this one, only showing up because the left-handed pitcher he’d scouted out of a D3 program in Youngstown just got signed to the Guardians farm system, and he wanted to gloat a little to the guys who’d called him a washout for skipping college to play semi-pro ball.
He’s leaning against the bar, half-empty beer in hand, watching a group of former cheerleaders take selfies, when he sees her. Lena’s hair has a thick streak of silver cutting through the dark brown he remembered, her hips are a little softer, and she’s wearing scuffed work boots under a velvet dress that hits her mid-thigh. He freezes, half-ready to duck out the back door, when she spots him, smiles that same lopsided smile that used to make his chest feel tight, and walks over. Her boot taps his by accident first, the leather warm where it presses against his scuffed work boot, and she holds eye contact for three full beats before she says hi.
He tenses, his jaw tight, ready to spit out some snarky comment about the rich car dealer’s son she’d left him for back in 1993, when she laughs, soft, and says she’s been looking for him for 28 years. He blinks. She orders a glass of pinot noir, and when she reaches across the bar to grab it, her forearm brushes his, the skin warm even through the thick flannel of his shirt, and he can smell vanilla and peppermint lip balm, the same exact scent she wore to prom. He doesn’t move away.
She suggests they sit in the booth in the back, away from the noise of the crowd, and he follows her without thinking. The vinyl is sticky under his jeans, the jukebox blaring Alan Jackson cuts through the hum of conversation, and when she crosses her legs under the table, her knee brushes his, neither of them pulls back. She tells him her mom got diagnosed with stage two breast cancer three weeks after graduation, she couldn’t afford the medical bills on her own, the car dealer’s dad had pulled strings to get her a full nursing scholarship and a low-interest loan for her mom’s treatment, she’d left three messages with his mom and sent a letter to his Florida semi-pro team address, but he’d already changed his number and moved to a different apartment complex, never got any of it. She’d married the guy ten years later, only after her mom was in full remission, and he’d died of a heart attack three years prior, leaving her a single mom to a 16-year-old daughter who wants to play college softball.
The anger he’d carried for so long fizzes out like a flat soda, and he feels stupid, so stupid, for holding onto it for so long, for wasting all that time being mad when he could have looked for her, could have asked. He runs a hand over the stubble on his jaw, admits he’d been so hurt he’d thrown away every photo he had of her, refused to talk to anyone who mentioned her name, even turned down a scouting gig in her city ten years ago just so he wouldn’t run into her. She laughs, soft, and reaches across the table, brushing a fleck of pretzel salt off his jaw, her thumb lingering on the rough stubble for a full two seconds before she pulls her hand back.
They talk for two hours, until most of the crowd has left, until the bartender is wiping down the bar and giving them pointed looks that it’s almost closing time. He walks her out to the parking lot, it’s drizzling, the asphalt smelling like wet concrete and pine from the trees lining the street, and he takes off his flannel jacket, holds it out to her. She takes it, slips it on, it’s too big, the sleeves hanging past her wrists, and she links her arm through his, leaning into his side a little as they walk to his truck. He opens the passenger door for her, and when she sits down, she tugs him down by the collar, kissing him slow, the peppermint from her lip balm mixing with the taste of pinot noir and the beer he’d been drinking, like they’ve got all the time in the world to make up for the years they lost.
