Russell “Rus” Voss, 53, has spent 18 years driving two-lane highways through small-town America as a minor league baseball scout for the Fort Wayne TinCaps. His biggest flaw? He still flinches any time someone mentions marital infidelity, leftover from the day his wife left him for a college baseball recruit he’d spent three months courting for a D1 scholarship. He’s in southern Indiana the last week of May, chasing a left-handed pitcher with a 92 mph fastball, when the sky splits open and dumps three inches of rain in 45 minutes, stranding him at the only bar in town, a cinder block spot called The Dugout with a tattered Cardinals pennant nailed above the register, the rain drumming so hard on the tin roof he can barely hear the jukebox playing old Johnny Cash in the corner.
He’s halfway through his second pour of bourbon, scuffed work boots propped on the sticky oak rail, when the new bartender drops a fresh bowl of salted peanuts in front of him without asking. Her name tag says Marnie. She’s got sun streaks in her brown hair, chipped cherry-red nail polish, and a faint scar curling above her left eyebrow. When she passes the glass to him, their fingers brush for half a second, and he catches the scent of lemon dish soap and warm vanilla perfume mixing with the bar’s usual beer and fried onion smell. He makes a dumb joke about the local high school’s terrible outfield grass, and she snorts, leaning her elbows on the bar so she’s only a foot away from his face, her eyes crinkling at the corners.
She mentions her 16-year-old son plays left field for the high school team, and asks if he’ll take a look at his swing the next day at the showcase. He pulls his beat-up scouting notebook out of his jacket pocket, flipping to the page marked with the high school’s logo, and she leans in closer to read his scrawled notes, her forearm pressing firm against his bicep. He can feel the heat of her skin through the thin cotton of his flannel shirt, and he has to fight the urge to turn his head and kiss the top of her sun-warmed hair. When she reaches behind him to grab a fresh bottle of seltzer for the last remaining patron, her hip presses hard against his shoulder for two full seconds, the rough denim of her cutoff shorts rubbing against his jaw. She freezes for a beat, her breath catching, before she pulls back, her cheeks flushed pink, and avoids his eyes for the next five minutes while she rings up the other customer’s tab.
The last patron leaves at 11:30, and Marnie locks the front door, flipping the neon “Open” sign off so the only light comes from the string of fairy lights strung above the back bar and the amber glow of the bourbon bottles. She says the main road out of town is flooded, and she can’t drive home for at least another hour. She pulls a stool next to his, popping the top off a root beer for herself, and their knees knock under the bar when she sits down. She admits she’s married to the town’s mayor, who’s running for re-election unopposed, and she’s been quietly filing for divorce for six months, too scared to tell anyone in town lest it tank his campaign. Rus feels the tight knot in his chest loosen—he’d spent the last hour fighting the urge to leave, disgusted with himself for being attracted to a married woman, haunted by the way his own marriage blew up all those years ago.
She reaches across the bar and laces her fingers through his, her palm calloused from pulling pints and pitching batting practice to her son after work, and says she hasn’t had a conversation with someone who didn’t want something from her husband in three years. She kisses him first, slow and soft, her mouth tasting like root beer and spearmint gum, and he doesn’t pull away. When they pull apart, she scribbles her cell phone number and her son’s game time on the back of a beer coaster, tucking it into the breast pocket of his flannel before she grabs her keys. The flood on the main road has receded enough to drive through by 12:45, and he walks her to her beat-up minivan, holding an old bar towel over her head to keep the rain off her hair.
She squeezes his hand twice before she climbs into the driver’s seat, rolling the window down to yell that she’ll bring her son’s swing highlight reel to the showcase the next morning. He stands in the rain long after her taillights disappear around the corner of Main Street, the crumpled beer coaster in his pocket already smudged from the wet, his scouting notebook open to a blank page he’d already marked with her son’s name in bright pink pen she’d slipped him when she kissed him goodbye.
