Manny Ruiz is 58, spent 32 years teaching high school woodshop before retiring last spring, now restores vintage game-used baseball bats for a small collective of collectors out of his garage in central Ohio. His worst flaw, per his 16-year-old grandson Javi, is that he’d rather spend a Saturday sanding a 1972 Reds bat than talk to another human being that isn’t Javi or his elderly beagle Mabel, a habit he picked up after his wife left him for a golf pro seven years prior. He’d skipped the last six neighborhood block parties entirely, but Javi begged him to enter the annual brisket contest this year, so he showed up with a 12-pound brisket he’d smoked for 18 hours, a cooler of Miller High Life, and zero intention of talking to anyone he didn’t already know.
The air smells like charcoal, sweet paprika rub, and cut grass, the hum of a cheap portable speaker blaring 90s country mixing with the screams of kids careening down a slip n slide strung across the front of the Johnson’s lawn. He’s leaning against an oak tree picking at a loose thread on his faded Ohio State work shirt when she walks over.
Lila Hart is 54, travels 10 months out of the year buying used rare books for independent stores across the Midwest, has lived two houses down from Manny for two and a half years. The neighborhood gossip mill has been working overtime for the last three weeks: she left her husband, the city councilman who’d just been caught embezzling $120k from the local public park budget, and everyone’s been giving her a wide berth, like whatever mess her ex made is contagious. Manny’s avoided her too, not because he buys the gossip, but because he’s spent two years glancing at her over his porch rail when she’s home, watching her carry stacks of boxes into her house, listening to her sing Dolly Parton off-key while she waters her tomato plants, and he’s too damn stubborn to admit he’s been half in love with her from the first time she waved at him and tripped over her own welcome mat.
She’s wearing cutoff denim shorts, a faded 1987 Dolly Parton tour tee, no shoes, a dark tan line across the bridge of her nose from driving with the windows down. She leans in to sniff the brisket sitting on the folding table next to him, and her bare shoulder brushes his bicep, warm through the thin cotton of his shirt. He freezes. She holds eye contact for three full beats longer than casual, the corner of her mouth tugging up in a half smile. “That smells better than any meal I’ve had in the last six months,” she says, her voice a little rough from allergies, and Manny has to clear his throat twice before he can answer.
He’s halfway through a deadpan joke about how his brisket’s definitely better than the rubber chicken her ex used to bring to every cookout when he notices three of the neighborhood HOA board members staring at them from across the street, eyebrows raised. The old familiar urge to run, to shut down, to mutter an excuse and go back to his garage hits him hard. He hates gossip, hates being the subject of neighborhood drama, half wants to tell her he’s busy so he can escape. But then she laughs, loud and unapologetic, and her hand brushes his when she reaches for a paper plate, her fingers calloused at the tips from turning book pages for 20 years, and the urge to run fades faster than the ice melting in his beer can.
She asks him if he wants to walk down to the creek at the end of the block to get away from the noise, and he hesitates for half a second, glancing at the HOA crew still staring. Then he grabs the last uncut slice of brisket from his tray, shoves it in a paper towel, grabs his beer, and nods. They walk past the slip n slide, past the cornhole boards, and when they round the bend where the oak trees block the rest of the neighborhood from view, she stops, reaches up, tugs on the frayed edge of his work shirt, and kisses him. She tastes like cherry seltzer and spearmint gum, her other hand cupping the side of his face, and he drops the brisket on the grass for a second before he remembers to kiss her back.
They sit on a fallen log by the creek later, the brisket resting between them, and she pulls a beat-up hardcover copy of *The Natural* out of the tote bag she’d slung over her shoulder, the dust jacket worn at the corners, first edition, dated 1952. “Found it at a garage sale in southern Indiana last month,” she says, pushing it into his hands. “I’ve been carrying it around in my car for three weeks, too scared to bring it over. I watch you work on those bats every Saturday, you know. You look like you’re having more fun than anyone else on the block.”
He tells her he’s been watching her too, tells her about the times he’d stayed on the porch an hour longer than he needed to just to listen to her sing while she gardened, and she laughs again, leaning into his side. He passes her the brisket, and she takes a bite, a smudge of barbeque sauce on the corner of her mouth. When she leans in to wipe a streak of sauce off his chin with her thumb, she doesn’t reach for a napkin after, just licks the sauce off her thumb slow, holding eye contact the whole time. Somewhere down the block, the speaker blares a Dolly Parton song, and the sound carries over the trees, faint and warm. He wraps his arm around her shoulders, pulls her closer, and doesn’t even think about the neighbors staring back at the block party.
