Leo Marquez, 52, is a minor league scout for the Cincinnati Reds, 18 years on the job, crisscrossing the Southeast in a beat-up 2016 Ford F-150 with a cooler of beer in the back and a stack of scouting notebooks in the passenger seat. His fatal flaw, as his older sister likes to tease, is that he’s dug himself so deep into his self-imposed widower’s routine he doesn’t remember how to let anyone close. It’s been eight years since his wife Linda died of ovarian cancer, and he hasn’t so much as bought a woman a drink in that time, convinced any new connection would be a betrayal of the 22 years they had together.
He pulls off A1A outside Port St. Lucie at 7 p.m., right after a high school playoff game, salt crusting on his forearms and the hum of a 17-year-old shortstop’s 93 mph across-the-diamond throw still buzzing in his head. The tiki bar’s strung with fairy lights, reggae low enough he can still hear the waves crash 50 yards away, and he slides onto a cracked vinyl bar stool, orders a dark rum and coke, extra lime. He’s rubbing the knot out of his left shoulder when a woman sits two stools over, smells like coconut sunscreen and vanilla laundry detergent, wears a faded Florida Gators hoodie with a bleach stain on the cuff and steel-toe work boots caked in dog hair.
She orders the exact same drink, glances over, nods. He nods back, expects that to be the end of it, until she leans over half an hour later, nods at the scouting notebook peeking out of his windbreaker pocket, asks if he was at the high school game down the road. He admits he was, says the shortstop has the best infield arm he’s seen all season. She laughs, says that shortstop is her son, Javi, that she’s spent the last three years driving him to travel tournaments across the state, runs a mobile dog grooming business out of a converted van to pay for the entry fees.
They talk for 45 minutes straight, the gap between their stools shrinking until their knees brush under the bar, neither of them pulling away. She reaches for a stack of napkins at the same time he does, their knuckles brushing, and he jolts like he’s touched a live wire, the heat of the contact shooting up his arm straight to his chest. She smirks, teases him for being jumpy, and he feels his face flush, something he hasn’t felt since he was a teenager asking Linda to prom. He tells her a story about a scout he used to work with who signed a kid that could throw 96 mph but couldn’t hit a beach ball if you tossed it to him underhand, and she leans in so close he can see the flecks of gold in her hazel eyes, her shoulder pressed to his, her laugh warm against his ear.
The conflict hits him square in the chest 10 minutes later, when she asks if he wants to walk the beach while they wait for Javi’s post-game team dinner to wrap up. He knows the team’s policy front to back: no fraternizing with family of active prospects, no exceptions, it’s grounds for immediate firing, and he feels a twist of shame at how badly he wants to say yes, at the way he’s already thinking about what her hand would feel like in his, what her lips would taste like. He hesitates long enough that she raises an eyebrow, says she knows the rule, that Javi already has three full-ride D1 offers on the table, even if he never signs with the Reds, it won’t change a thing for her kid. She says she’s not talking to him for a leg up, she’s talking to him because he’s the first person who’s asked her about her job, not just her son’s baseball stats, in three years.
He says yes. They kick off their shoes, walk barefoot in the warm, wet sand, the waves lapping at their ankles, the sky turning pink and tangerine as the sun dips below the Atlantic. She stops halfway down the stretch of empty beach, turns to him, and before he can overthink it, he leans in, kisses her. She tastes like rum and cherry lip balm, her hands coming up to rest on his chest, the callus on her thumb from trimming dog nails rough against the fabric of his windbreaker. For the first time in eight years, he doesn’t feel guilty for feeling good, doesn’t feel like he’s letting Linda down, just feels present, the salt on his skin, the sound of the waves, the weight of her hands on him.
They walk back to the bar 20 minutes later, her hand tangled in his, just as Javi’s beat-up Tacoma pulls into the parking lot. The kid leans out the window, grins, yells “Hey scout, you gonna offer me that contract yet?” Leo laughs, yells back “Only if you stop swinging for the fences on every first pitch, kid.” She squeezes his hand, leans up to kiss his cheek, scribbles her phone number on a napkin and shoves it in his notebook before she walks over to her son’s truck. He sits back down at the bar, orders another rum and coke, flips open his scouting notebook to the page with Javi’s stats, tucks the napkin right next to the note about his 93 mph arm strength. He pulls out his phone, types her number into his contacts, hits save before he can talk himself out of it.
