Rafe Munoz, 53, has spent the last 18 years driving backroads from small town ballfields to even smaller town motels, a radar gun tucked in the passenger seat of whatever rental car the Double-A Frisco RoughRiders front office springs for that month. His flaw, if you ask his older sister who still lives in their hometown outside El Paso, is that he hasn’t let anyone sit in that passenger seat for 12 years, not since his ex-wife left him for a Division I pitching coach she met at a tournament. He calls it prioritizing work. Everyone else calls it being scared.
This week, he’s outside of Altoona, Pennsylvania, scouting a 19-year-old lefty who throws a 96 mile an hour fastball and bites his lip so hard when he’s focused he bleeds. His rental car died on the drive from the field the night before, so when the front desk clerk at his motel mentions the VFW post three blocks over is doing their Friday fish fry, he laces up his scuffed work boots and heads over, no hat for once, the graying strands at his temple catching the last of the golden hour sun.
The air inside the VFW hits him first: crispy fried cod, vinegar coleslaw, cheap Pabst that’s been sitting in the tap lines too long, and a faint whiff of cherry pipe tobacco from the group of old guys playing cards in the corner. The jukebox is blaring Merle Haggard’s “Mama Tried” so loud the linoleum under his boots hums a little. He grabs a paper plate piled high with fish and slaw, sits at the far end of the bar, the only empty spot that’s not within yelling distance of the card table.
He’s three bites into his fish when she slides into the seat two spots down, flannel sleeves rolled up to her elbows, a scar slashing a pale line above her left eyebrow, her dark hair pulled back in a messy braid. She’s selling raffle tickets for the local youth baseball league, he realizes, when she leans over the guy in the middle seat to ask him if he wants to drop five dollars for a shot at a new portable cooler. Her forearm brushes his when she holds out the roll of tickets, and he catches a whiff of cedar shampoo and vanilla lip balm, sharp and warm against the beer and fried food smell of the room.
He buys five tickets, doesn’t even care about the cooler. When the guy between them gets up to leave, she shifts into his spot, so close her knee brushes the side of his worn denim jeans every time she adjusts her seat to wave at someone across the room. She holds eye contact two beats longer than polite when he admits he’s a scout, not a local, here to check out the lefty pitcher who graduated from the high school across town last year. Oh, she says, grinning so the little gap between her two front teeth shows, that’s my little brother.
For half a second, Rafe’s brain short circuits. His first thought is that this is a trap, that she’s here to butter him up to give her kid a better contract, that he should finish his fish, pay his tab, and leave before he does something stupid that costs him his job. The bitter, defensive part of him that he’s carried around for 12 years is screaming that this is exactly the kind of mess he swore he’d avoid. But then she laughs at his dumb joke about umpires who can’t tell a strike from a grapefruit, her shoulder pressing into his bicep when she leans over to grab her root beer off the bar, and he can’t make himself stand up.
She tells him the scar above her eye is from when she was 16, playing third base in a rec league, took a line drive to the face and didn’t even sit down for the rest of the inning. He tells her about the time he got hit in the ribs by a foul ball at a game in Amarillo, still has a purple bruise that comes back every time the weather turns cold. She steals a fry off his plate without asking, crunches it loud, teases him for ordering extra crispy just like a 10 year old.
When the VFW starts clearing out a little after 8, she asks him if he wants to walk down to the lake half a mile away, says she wants to show him the dock where her brother used to throw rocks at empty beer cans for hours when he was a kid, perfecting his pitching motion before he even had a glove. He hesitates, his old habit of running from anything that doesn’t involve a radar gun and a scouting report kicking in, but then she tilts her head at him, eyes bright, and he says yes.
The gravel road to the lake crunches under their boots, the air cool enough that he can see his breath when he laughs, the smell of cut grass and lake algae mixing with the cedar scent still clinging to her from earlier. They sit on the edge of the splintered wooden dock, their feet dangling a foot above the dark water, and she tells him about how her brother worked at a lumber yard for two years after their dad died to help pay their mom’s medical bills, almost quit baseball entirely before his coach talked him into coming back to the team. Rafe tells her he already made the call to offer the kid a contract yesterday, was just sticking around the extra few days to make sure he didn’t have the kind of ego that makes good players burn out fast.
She turns to look at him then, her face lit up pink by the sunset, and she leans in slow, kisses him soft, her hand resting light on his knee. He cups her cheek with his left hand, the callus on his palm from 20 years of holding a radar gun brushing the soft skin under her eye, and for the first time in 12 years, he doesn’t overthink it. He doesn’t worry about the 22-year age gap, or the professional line he’s tiptoeing, or the way his ex left him with a note on the kitchen counter and half the furniture gone. He just kisses her back.
They sit there for another hour, passing his leftover fish back and forth, making fun of the group of teens who drive by the lake access road blaring terrible rap music, yelling out the windows. When the sun dips all the way below the treeline and the air gets cold enough that he can see her shiver a little, he offers to walk her back to her beat up pickup truck parked in the VFW lot. She hands him a crumpled slip of receipt paper from the bar, her phone number scrawled across it in bright blue ink, says she’s driving down to Frisco next month for her brother’s first minor league game, expects him to save her a seat in the stands next to him.
He tucks the paper into the inner pocket of his scouting notebook, the same spot he keeps all his highest-priority prospect notes, and nods, watches her pull out of the lot, waving out the window, before he turns to walk back to his motel. He doesn’t even think about the 12 years of empty motel rooms and quiet drives home he’s carried with him, not for a single step of the walk back.
