Manny Ruiz, 53, spent 27 years as a minor league baseball equipment manager before a torn rotator cuff forced early retirement, now runs a custom bat refinishing business out of his detached garage in Lakeland, Florida. His biggest flaw is that he holds grudges like they’re collector’s items—he still hasn’t spoken to the major league front office rep who passed him over for a big league staff spot eight years prior, and he’d spent the last two months actively avoiding his new next door neighbor, ever since she’d been the public face of the county’s 18% property tax hike to fund a new high school football stadium. He’d only dragged himself to the VFW fish fry that Friday because his old road roomie begged him, grumbling the whole drive over about overpaid bureaucrats wasting taxpayer money.
The folding tables were packed when he got there, the air thick with the smell of fried catfish, hushpuppies, and cheap beer, the hum of conversation loud enough to drown out the country cover band setting up by the back wall. He grabbed a paper plate, loaded it up, and spotted the only empty seat left at the far end of a table, right next to the woman he’d been avoiding. He considered standing, but his bad shoulder was already throbbing, so he slid into the seat without making eye contact, shoveling a bite of catfish into his mouth like it owed him money.
Ten minutes later, she slid into the seat beside him, carrying a plate heaped with fried okra and coleslaw, and muttered an apology about the crowd. Her elbow brushed his bicep when she reached across the table for tartar sauce, and he flinched like he’d been burned—he hadn’t felt a woman’s skin against his since his wife passed three years prior, hadn’t wanted to. He caught a whiff of coconut shampoo under the fried food smell, glanced over, and noticed a smudge of cornbread crumbs on the edge of her left cheek, chipped pale pink nail polish, a thin scar snaking across her wrist from what looked like an old softball injury. She caught him staring, raised an eyebrow, and smiled, and he snapped his gaze back to his plate, face hot, annoyed at himself for even looking.
He couldn’t help the snappish comment when she mentioned she’d seen him out in his garage sanding bats late at night. “You got time to spy on neighbors between jacking up our taxes?” he said, and immediately felt like an ass when she laughed, low and warm, no bite. She shifted closer, her knee brushing his under the table, and explained the old stadium had toxic mold that’d been sending kid after kid to the nurse with asthma attacks, the school board vote had been unanimous, she’d just drawn the short straw to announce it to the public. She held his gaze the whole time she talked, no deflection, no corporate speak, and he felt his frustration softening, even as he tried to hold onto it.
The band struck up a slow cover of a 1994 Alan Jackson track a few minutes later, and she nodded toward the small patch of grass people were dancing on. “You dance?” she asked, and he hesitated, thinking of the last time he’d danced, at his wife’s 40th birthday, how he’d stepped on her toes three times and she’d laughed so hard she snort-laughed. He nodded, and when she took his hand to lead him over, his palm was sweaty, her hand calloused from the rose bushes he’d seen her tending on weekends, their fingers fitting together like they’d been made to.
They swayed slow, her head just level with his shoulder, her hair brushing his jaw when she moved, and he admitted he’d been avoiding her on purpose, that he’d thought she was just another out of touch suit. She laughed against his shirt, and said she’d been leaving the homemade beef empanadas on his porch every Sunday, the ones he’d thought were from the old lady down the street, because she’d never seen him carry groceries in that weren’t frozen dinners or beer.
They left the fry half an hour later, walking the three blocks back to their adjacent houses, and he offered to show her the bat he was refinishing for a 12-year-old Little Leaguer whose dad had died in a car crash earlier that year. She followed him into the garage, ran a finger along the polished maple of the finished bat, and asked if he wanted to come over for coffee the next morning, no talk of taxes, no grudges allowed. He nodded, the warm press of her shoulder against his as they stood under the flickering garage light chasing away the last of his stubborn, long-held refusal to let anyone new in.
