Rafe Mendez, 53, has spent most of the last decade driving 300-plus mile stretches between minor league baseball dugouts across the Carolinas, his work truck stacked with scouting reports, sunflower seed shells, and a dented cooler of sweet tea. He’s a cautious man by trade and by grief—his wife passed seven years prior from a sudden aneurysm, and he’s avoided even casual flirtation since, convinced any attempt at romance would make him look like a bumbling old fool in front of the 20-something scouts he’s often paired with on the road. That cautiousness is the first thing he abandons the second he steps up to the peach pie booth at the Lexington County Fair, fresh off watching a left-handed pitcher throw three scoreless innings for the local minor league affiliate.
It’s 92 degrees, the air thick with the smell of fried Oreos, cut grass, and diesel fumes from the tractor pulling the hayride. The woman behind the booth is wiping sweat off the back of her neck with the hem of her yellow sundress, her dark hair pulled back in a loose braid dotted with stray peach fuzz. Her husband’s campaign signs are plastered every three feet across the fairgrounds—shiny red placards that read VOTE HANK TILLMAN, COUNTY SHERIFF, flanked by a photo of a man with a jaw like a cinder block. Rafe doesn’t care about local politics. He only cares about the slice of warm peach pie she slides across the wooden counter, their fingers brushing when she hands him a plastic fork.
The contact lasts half a second, tops, but it sends a jolt up his arm that he hasn’t felt since his first date with his wife back in college. She holds his eye contact for a beat longer than polite, tilting her head at the faded UNC Asheville baseball cap he wears on off days, the one his wife picked out for him their senior year. “I graduated there in ‘97,” she says, wiping a smudge of peach filling off her cheek with the back of her hand. “Small world.”
He leans against the edge of the booth, his knee almost brushing hers when she steps forward to adjust a stack of paper plates. The noise of the fair fades to a low hum around them: the distant scream of kids on the Tilt-A-Whirl, the fair announcer yelling about the upcoming pig race, the buzz of bumblebees darting between the baskets of peaches stacked next to the booth. He’s acutely aware of the way her sundress sticks to the curve of her hip when she leans over to grab a napkin, of the faint smell of coconut shampoo that hangs around her, of the fact that her husband is shaking hands with a group of farmers not 20 feet away, his booming laugh carrying over the crowd.
He feels a sharp twist of guilt in his gut. He’s never cheated on anyone, never even so much as flirted with a married woman before, and part of him wants to grab his pie, mumble a thank you, and hightail it back to his truck for the two-hour drive to his empty house in Charlotte. But he stays, rooted to the spot, when she nods at the faded scouting patch on the breast of his flannel shirt and asks him what he does for work. He tells her about the left-handed pitcher he just watched, about the way the kid throws a curveball that drops like a stone, about the 12-hour road trips he takes alone with only classic country radio for company. She listens, leaning against the booth edge so their shoulders are almost touching, laughing when he tells her about the time a stray dog ran onto the field mid-game and stole the pitcher’s glove.
A bumblebee drifts too close to his collar, and she swats it away gently, her palm lingering on his bicep for two full seconds before she pulls her hand back, her cheeks pink under the sun. “Hank’s busy with the campaign for the next hour,” she says, her voice low enough that only he can hear it, nodding at the canvas curtain strung across the back of the booth. “I’ve got a cooler of peach hard cider back there. You wanna sit for a minute?”
His first instinct is to say no. To tell her he’s got a drive to make, that he doesn’t do this kind of thing, that he’s not that guy. But then he looks at her, at the faint crinkles around her eyes when she smiles, at the smudge of peach filling still on her jaw, and he nods. He follows her behind the curtain, the noise of the fair cutting off almost entirely the second the fabric falls closed behind them. They sit shoulder to shoulder on a folding plastic chair, passing a cold can of hard cider back and forth, their knuckles brushing every time they hand it off. She tells him about how she hates campaign events, how Hank spends more time shaking hands with strangers than he does talking to her, how she hasn’t been on a road trip that didn’t involve a campaign stop in three years. He tells her about his wife, about how he still makes her favorite chocolate chip cookies every Sunday, even though he only eats half the batch.
Her head tilts onto his shoulder for three quiet seconds, and he can feel the warmth of her cheek through his shirt, before they hear Hank’s booming voice calling her name from the front of the booth. She jumps up, wiping off her sundress, and shoves a crumpled paper bag into his hands before he can stand. “Extra pie,” she says, slipping a scrap of paper with her phone number scribbled on it into his flannel pocket, her fingers brushing his chest when she tucks it in. “Hank’s going to a campaign conference in Myrtle Beach next week. Text me if you’re ever in the area again.”
He walks back to his truck, the paper bag warm in his hand, the scrap of paper digging into his palm through his pocket. He sets the pie on the passenger seat, pulls his UNC Asheville cap off for a second to wipe the sweat off his forehead, and pulls out his phone to send her a text before he even turns the key in the ignition.
