Rafe Mendez, 52, is a minor league baseball scout who’s logged 180,000 miles on his beat-up Ford F-150 in six years, hasn’t had a second date in a decade, and stubbornly refuses to let anyone he meets on the road leave so much as a toothbrush in his truck cab. His ex-wife left him 12 years back, packed the kitchen while he was at a summer showcase in Cape Cod, left a note on the fridge that said I’m tired of being second to a bunch of 19-year-olds with fastballs and bad attitudes. He hasn’t let anyone get close enough to be second to anything since.
He’s in southern Ohio this week, scouting a left-handed high school pitcher with a 92 mph fastball and a habit of chewing tobacco during innings, camped out at the only bar in town that serves cold draft beer and doesn’t blare pop country loud enough to rattle his fillings. The bar smells like fried pickles and old pine, the jukebox spins a scratchy Johnny Cash record, and peanut shells crunch under his boots when he shifts on the bar stool. He’s got his scouting notebook splayed open in front of him, half a page of scribbled notes about the pitcher’s curveball mechanics, when the stool two down scrapes against the floor.
She sits down wearing high-waisted jeans and a faded library volunteer hoodie, smells like lavender hand cream and lemon Pledge, like she spent all afternoon dusting old hardcovers. When the bartender slides her a glass of pinot grigio, she reaches for it the exact same time Rafe reaches for his beer, their knuckles brushing. His are calloused from gripping radar guns and hauling duffels, hers soft but ridged with tiny calluses at the fingertips, from turning thousands of book pages. She holds eye contact two beats longer than polite, smirks, says she saw him yelling at the home plate ump during that afternoon’s playoff game, that she agreed with him, the outfielder was clearly safe at second.
He should brush her off. He promised his old college roommate, the high school team’s head coach, that he wouldn’t mess with anyone local while he was in town, that the place is so small news travels faster than that lefty’s fastball. He’s got three days left before he drives to West Virginia for the next showcase, he doesn’t need the drama. But she’s sharp, teases him about the coffee stain on his scouting notebook cover, asks if he ever gets tired of watching teenagers miss cut-off throws and forget to run out ground balls. When a group of rowdy senior baseball players piles through the front door yelling, she shifts to the stool right next to him, her shoulder brushing his bicep when she leans in to point at a typo in his notes. Her hair falls over his forearm for half a second, silken, and he has to fight the urge to tuck the strand behind her ear.
They talk for two hours. She tells him she’s the town’s new head librarian, moved here three months prior from Chicago, got sick of the noise and the rent. He tells her about the time a prospect tried to hit a home run with a cracked bat, ended up shattering it into three pieces that flew into the dugout and knocked over the coach’s cooler of Gatorade. When she laughs, it’s a little rough, like she smokes a cigarette every now and then when she’s alone reading on her fire escape, and the sound goes straight to his chest. He finds himself leaning in closer, close enough to see the faint smudge of blue ink on her left cheek, like she was marking up library book spines earlier and forgot to wipe it off.
The bar closes at 11, the bartender flipping the lights on to signal last call, and she asks if he wants to walk her back to her apartment three blocks away. The air is cool, crickets chirping in the cornfields at the edge of town, streetlights casting gold over the cracked sidewalks. Halfway there, she stops under an oak tree strung with fairy lights someone put up for the town festival last weekend, leans up and kisses him first. She tastes like pinot grigio and mint gum, and he doesn’t pull away, his hands settling light on her waist, like he’s scared she’ll vanish if he holds too tight.
He stays the night. Wakes up at 6 a.m. like he always does, his internal clock set for early scouting games, her head on his chest, one hand fisted in the hem of his old t-shirt. He doesn’t slip out before she wakes up like he usually would. He makes coffee in her dented little coffee pot, leaves a note with his cell number and a ticket to that night’s playoff game tucked under the mug on her kitchen counter, and when she stumbles out of the bedroom rubbing her eyes, he hands her a mug of black coffee just the way she mentioned she liked it the night before.
He drives out to the high school field an hour later, the sun coming up pink over the cornfields, and for the first time in 12 years, he doesn’t feel like he’s just passing through. He stops at the diner on the edge of town for a breakfast sandwich on his way, and when the waitress sets his coffee down in front of him, he picks up a pen from the counter and scrawls her name on the napkin next to his scouting notes, three times, before he remembers he’s supposed to be grading the lefty’s pick-off move.
