Ronan O’Malley, 52, a minor league baseball scout for a Tennessee Double-A affiliate, has spent the last eight years deliberately walling himself off from any local connections after his ex-wife left him for a pharmaceutical rep she met at a dentist’s appointment. He’s convinced any personal attachment will just get in the way of his cross-country scouting schedule, 11 months a year living out of his beat-up 2018 Ford F-150, surviving on gas station coffee and frozen burritos, only coming back to northern Alabama every May for his old college coach’s annual crawfish boil. He only attends out of obligation, usually leaves before the sun dips below the oak trees, avoids all small talk like it’s a bad slider over the plate.
This year, he’s leaned up against the beer cooler, sweating through his faded Ole Miss ball cap, ignoring his old teammates who keep yelling for him to join their cornhole game, when Maeve walks over holding two paper plates heaped with spicy crawfish, buttery corn on the cob, and red potatoes dusted with cayenne. She’s the coach’s 48-year-old niece, moved back to the farm six months prior after her ex-husband retired to Fort Myers with his 28-year-old administrative assistant, runs the family’s weekend vegetable stand out by the highway. He’s talked to her all of three times in eight years, every exchange limited to polite hellos by the cooler. She says the coach sent her over to make sure he ate something, since he always looks like he’s one missed meal away from blowing away in a thunderstorm. He smirks, takes the plate, follows her to the cinder block bench tucked next to the fire pit.
The plastic bench is wobbly, so when she sits down and shifts to cross her legs, her denim-clad knee brushes his firmly, warm through the frayed cuff of his work jeans. He doesn’t move away. The air smells like smoke, boiled shellfish, and cut grass, zydeco music blaring tinny from the speakers by the porch, kids screaming as they chase each other around the yard with leftover crawfish claws. She teases him about the stack of scouting reports sticking out of his back pocket, asks if he’s still chasing high school kids with fastballs that can break a windshield. He laughs, tells her about a 16-year-old in rural Mississippi he saw last week who threw 96 mph but couldn’t remember his own address after the game, still drunk off the moonshine his uncle gave him for his birthday. She snorts beer out of her nose a little, wipes her mouth with the back of her hand, and he notices the smudge of paprika on her left cheek, the faint scar above her eyebrow from when she fell off a horse as a teen, the way her hazel eyes catch the firelight when she looks directly at him.
He’s panicking a little, halfway to making an excuse to leave, because he hasn’t had a conversation this easy with anyone that wasn’t about pitch counts or exit velocity in eight years. He keeps telling himself she’s coach’s family, off limits, he’s leaving in three days to go scout a tournament in Georgia, there’s no point in starting anything. But then she reaches across him to grab a bottle of lemonade from the cooler at his feet, her hand brushing the thick, pale scar on his left wrist he got from a line drive that cracked his bone senior year of college. She pauses, runs her thumb over the raised skin for half a second, soft like she’s not even thinking about it, asks how he got it. He tells her, and for some reason he also tells her about the ex-wife, about how he started living out of his truck to avoid the empty house they used to share, about how he thought he was fine being alone till right now.
The sun dips below the tree line, most of the crowd has piled into their trucks and left, the coach passed out in his lawn chair with a half-empty beer in his hand, the zydeco speakers turned down so low you can barely hear the accordion over the crickets. She leans in, her shoulder pressed firm to his, the scent of her coconut shampoo mixing with the fire smoke and spicy crawfish in the air. She says she’s watched him come to this boil every year for eight years, always stood off to the side, never smiled at anyone, always left before dark, and she always wondered what was going on in his head. He says he was usually wondering how fast he could get back on the highway, but this year he doesn’t want to leave. She tilts her chin up, kisses him slow, her lips soft, tasting like lager and spicy shellfish and the spearmint gum she’s been chewing all afternoon. He kisses her back, his hand coming up to cup her jaw, careful not to smudge the paprika on her cheek.
They sit there till the fire burns down to glowing embers, till the coach’s wife comes out on the porch to yell that she’s locking up the house for the night. He walks her to her beat-up Subaru, she pulls a purple pen out of her purse, yanks the top scouting report sticking out of his back pocket, scribbles her number on the back, right next to his notes about a left-handed pitcher from Tuscaloosa with a killer curveball. She tells him to text her when he’s back through town, or even when he’s stuck in a boring hotel room in the middle of nowhere, she doesn’t mind. He nods, tucks the report back in his pocket, watches her drive off before he climbs into his own truck. He pulls the report back out, stares at the messy purple numbers for a minute, grins, tucks it into his glove compartment where he keeps all his most important scouting notes. He turns the key, rolls the window down, and pulls out onto the dirt road, the smell of cayenne still clinging to his worn flannel shirt.
