Moe Sorrentino, 53, had spent the last eight years avoiding the Coventry Township summer fish fry like it was a left-hander with a 90 mph fastball and zero control. A minor league baseball scout who logged 200+ days a year crisscrossing Ohio and western Pennsylvania in a beat-up 2017 Silverado, he was stubborn to a fault, still holding the grudge against his ex-wife for walking out on him for a pharmaceutical sales rep with a lake house and a boat he’d mocked relentlessly at holiday parties. The fish fry was her main volunteer gig every year, so he’d skipped it entirely after the divorce, even when his old little league coach begged him to come, even when the local rec department was honoring his best friend from high school for 25 years of coaching tee ball. This year, though, he couldn’t say no. His buddy had beat stage 3 colon cancer six months prior, and Moe owed him too much to miss the ceremony.
The air was thick and humid the second he stepped out of his truck, 84 degrees with that sharp, green smell of freshly cut grass and fried cod drifting from the pavilion. He wore a faded Cleveland Guardians cap pulled low over his sunburned nose, scuffed work boots caked with infield dirt from a tournament he’d scouted outside Toledo the weekend before, a threadbare flannel shirt tied around his waist even though he knew he’d be sweating through his plain white tee in 10 minutes. He grabbed a paper plate from the stack at the entrance, nodded at a few guys he’d played high school ball with, and was halfway to the cod table when he bumped hard into someone coming the other way, a tray of peach cobbler samples tilting so far a dollop of warm, syrupy fruit spilled right onto his bare forearm.
He stepped back, ready to apologize, and froze. It was Lena Marlow, his ex-wife’s first cousin. He’d known her since they were teens, had watched her break her knee crashing a dirt bike at a Fourth of July party when she was 17, had sat across from her at every family holiday dinner for 12 years of his marriage, had always felt a dumb, unnameable jolt when she laughed too loud or called him out for talking too much about pitching mechanics at the dinner table. He’d actively avoided her for eight years, too, out of some misplaced loyalty to the divorce line he’d drawn in the sand, convinced even talking to her would be crossing some invisible boundary he’d built for himself.
Her fingers brushed his forearm first, dabbing at the cobbler with a crumpled paper napkin, her skin cool even through the sticky syrup. She wore a silver ring shaped like a baseball on her thumb, he noticed, her nails chipped from working in the community garden she ran on the west side of town, a streak of silver running through the dark hair she’d pulled back in a messy braid. She was 48, he remembered, divorced three years herself, worked at the local library running the youth reading program. “Nice to see you finally crawled out of your scout van hole,” she said, grinning, holding his eye contact longer than strictly necessary, her shoulder brushing his when a group of kids ran past screaming chasing an ice cream truck. He could smell lavender perfume mixed with the sweet sugar of the cobbler on her shirt, could hear the crackle of the fryer behind her, the distant crack of a bat from the little league field down the road.
He told himself he should walk away. That his ex would throw an absolute fit if she saw them talking, that the entire town would be gossiping about it by Sunday morning, that he had no business getting tangled up with anyone related to the woman who’d broken half his kitchen plates on her way out the door. But then she said she’d been reading his scouting write-ups in the Akron Beacon Journal, that she’d screamed when the kid he’d pushed for got drafted in the third round by the Reds last year, that she’d always thought his ex was an idiot for leaving someone who cared that much about the work he did. No one had paid that much attention to his job in years, not even the guys he worked for, half the time. He leaned against the picnic table next to her, his elbow brushing hers every time he adjusted his cap, and talked to her for 45 minutes straight, about the kid left-hander he’d seen throw a perfect game the week before, about the tomato plants she was growing that kept getting eaten by deer, about how both of them hated the new fancy coffee shop that had replaced the old diner on Main Street.
When the ceremony for his friend ended, she tilted her head, that same sharp, warm grin on her face, and asked if he wanted to head down to the Dusty Mule, the dive bar he hung out at every time he was in town, to get a beer and split an order of cheese curds. He hesitated for half a second, his brain screaming that this was a terrible idea, that it would stir up all the old drama he’d spent eight years running from, that the guilt of even thinking about dating his ex’s cousin was gnawing at the back of his throat. But then she slipped her hand into his, her palm calloused from digging in her garden, and said she’d been wanting to ask him out since she was 22, even when he was dumb and married and too busy talking about curveballs to notice her staring at him across the dinner table.
He said yes. They snuck out before anyone could stop them, him carrying the half-empty tray of cobbler to her beat-up Subaru, her hand still in his the whole way across the parking lot, the asphalt still warm through the soles of his boots, the crickets just starting to chirp in the trees lining the road. He didn’t even glance back to see if anyone was watching, didn’t care if his ex heard about it by the end of the night, didn’t overthink it for the first time in eight years. He squeezed her hand back, the sticky leftover peach syrup still smudged on his forearm, when she opened her car door and asked if he wanted to stop for ice cream on the way to the bar.
