Ray Voss, 53, a minor league baseball scout who spent 10 months of every year crisscrossing the Midwest in a dented Ford F-150 evaluating 19-year-old pitchers with 95 mph fastballs and terrible impulse control, had avoided the annual Maplewood Fall Festival for eight straight years. His divorce had turned small town gatherings into minefields of well-meaning questions and awkward side hugs from people he’d barely spoken to in two decades, so when his buddy the fire chief strong-armed him into showing up this October, he’d stuffed three cold IPAs in his jacket pocket and planned to make a hasty exit after 45 minutes max.
He’d burned through 20 of those minutes dodging his former neighbor who kept trying to set him up with her cousin who taught third grade, so he cut through the craft booths toward the food line, figuring a slice of pie would at least make the rest of the trip worth it. The woman behind the pie booth wiped flour off her gingham apron and looked up, and Ray froze. It was Lila Marlow, his high school girlfriend’s younger sister, the girl he’d spent three years deliberately ignoring when she hung around their after-game bonfires, 16 years old with a nose ring and a habit of stealing sips of his beer when her sister wasn’t looking. She was 48 now, silver streaks in her dark hair, a tattoo of a sunflower peeking out of her shirt collar, and she grinned like she’d been expecting him.
She leaned across the booth, elbows on the wooden counter, and the smell of vanilla extract and cinnamon drifted over to him, cutting through the sharp scent of fried dough and diesel from the festival tractor rides. “You still wear that ratty Cardinals cap,” she said, nodding at the faded hat on his head, the brim frayed where he chewed it during tense scouting games. Her voice was lower than he remembered, rougher around the edges, like she spent half her days yelling over oven fans. When he ordered a slice of peach pie, she reached across the counter to hand him the paper plate, and their fingers brushed for half a second, the callus on her thumb from kneading dough catching on the scar on his knuckle from the time he crashed his pickup senior year.
He stood off to the side of the booth eating the pie, watching her laugh with little kids who begged for extra crumble topping, and the familiar twist of guilt hit him. Back in high school, he’d turned down her flirts so many times he’d lost count, told himself she was too young, too off-limits, that dating his girlfriend’s little sister would make him the biggest asshole in town. Now, 27 years later, that old rule felt stupid, but the years of being alone had made him rusty, made him want to mumble an excuse and bolt back to his empty cabin and his stack of game tapes. He’d just wiped the last of the pie filling off his chin when she tapped him on the arm, her palm warm even through the thick flannel of his shirt.
“My shift ends in 20 minutes,” she said, not looking away from his eyes, the green of hers bright against the pink of her cheeks from the cold wind. “The dive bar down on Main has that peanut butter porter you used to love. You wanna join me?”
He almost said no. Almost made up a lie about having to go evaluate a kid’s pitching tape before the sun went down. But then she shifted her weight, and her knee brushed his, and he could hear the festival band launching into a worn cover of “Jack & Diane” in the background, and he nodded.
They sat in the back booth of the bar an hour later, the sticky table between them dotted with peanut shells, their half-empty beer glasses sweating in the low light. She told him she’d opened her own bakery in the next town over three years prior, had spent most of her 20s and 30s wondering if he’d ever stop being such a stick-in-the-mud and ask her out. He told her about the kid he’d scouted last month who could throw 97 mph but cried every time he struck someone out, about the cabin he’d fixed up on the edge of town, about how he’d forgotten what it felt like to talk to someone who didn’t care about batting averages or signing bonuses.
She leaned forward, her elbow on the table, and her shoulder brushed his when she pointed at the TV above the bar playing an old Cardinals game. He could smell her perfume, sweet and woody, and when she laughed at a joke he made about his terrible senior year prom date, her hand rested on his forearm for three full beats before she pulled it away. He fished the keys to his cabin out of his jacket pocket, set them on the table between them, and smiled when she picked them up, twisting the keychain with the tiny baseball charm on it between her fingers.
