Rafe Mendez, 52, has spent 24 years driving 40,000 miles a year as a minor league baseball scout, chasing high school and DIII prospects with a good fastball and a worse attitude, the kind of kids who play like they’ve got something to prove. He’s got a scar snaking up his left elbow from the Tommy John surgery that killed his own shot at the majors at 26, a binder full of scouting reports tucked under the passenger seat of his beat-up F-150, and a rule he’s never broken: don’t mess with anyone in the towns he passes through, no matter how pretty they smile.
The October wind off the Ohio cornfields bit through his flannel as he sat on the bleachers for three hours, watching the local high school shortstop he’d driven six hours to see hit a walk-off double in the final inning. The crowd screamed, parents streamed onto the field, and Rafe stuffed his notebook in his jacket pocket, already heading for the only bar in town, The Dugout, to warm his bones with a cold draft and a plate of cheese fries.
The bar smelled like fried onions and sawdust, Johnny Cash’s *Folsom Prison Blues* humming low from the jukebox when he slid onto a stool at the far end of the bar, as far from the rowdy group of team parents as he could get. He’d been nursing his beer for ten minutes when she sat down next to him, so close their elbows brushed when she reached for the bowl of salted peanuts on the counter. He caught a whiff of vanilla lotion and pine, like she’d been cutting wood before the game, and glanced over. He recognized her from the bleachers, the woman who’d screamed so loud when the shortstop hit that double her voice went hoarse, dark red hair pulled back in a messy braid, chipped burgundy nail polish, work boots caked with mud.
She ordered an old fashioned, no extra sugar, and turned to him, her hazel eyes flecked with gold crinkling at the corners when she nodded at the scouting patch on his jacket. “You’re the guy who’s been scribbling notes all game, right? My stepson’s the shortstop.” Rafe nodded, half tempted to lie, to make up some story about being a tourist passing through, but he’d never been a good liar. She laughed when he told her he’d driven six hours to watch 18 minutes of game time, her knee bumping his under the bar, and she didn’t move it away. She told him her husband was the county sheriff, out on a domestic call all night, that she’d snuck out of the post-game potluck because she couldn’t stand listening to the other moms brag about their kids’ college acceptances for another hour.
He told her about the kid he scouted in Iowa last spring who threw a no-hitter while his family’s cow was calving in the parking lot behind the field, and she touched his forearm when she laughed, her palm warm through the thin fabric of his shirt. For a second he froze, his chest tight, because he hadn’t let anyone touch him that casually, that intentionally, in three years, not since he’d hooked up with a waitress in Des Moines and spent the whole next week overthinking if he should have called her back. He knew the rule, knew messing with the sheriff’s wife in a town where everyone knew everyone’s business was the dumbest thing he could do, could get him run out of town before he even got the shortstop’s contract signed, could ruin the career he’d built from the ashes of his own failed dream. But she kept leaning in, her shoulder pressed to his, her breath warm when she said she’d seen him here three times before, scouting other prospects, that she’d been working up the nerve to talk to him every time.
He should have said no, should have paid his tab and driven back to his motel 10 miles out of town, should have stuck to the rule that’d kept him safe, kept him from feeling anything but the quiet hum of the open road for eight years. But when she leaned in so close her lips almost brushed his ear, when she said her husband wouldn’t be home until noon the next day, when she asked if he wanted to come back to her place, the words were out of his mouth before he could think twice.
They left separately, her beat-up Subaru pulling out of the parking lot first, him waiting 10 minutes before he followed, the crunch of fallen maple leaves under his tires loud in the quiet dark. He pulled into her gravel driveway 15 minutes later, the porch light glowing gold around her where she stood holding the screen door open, her flannel unbuttoned to show the faded Tom Petty tee underneath. He cut the engine, grabbed his jacket off the passenger seat, and stepped out into the crisp, pine-scented air.
