Rafe Mendez, 53, minor league baseball scout for the Detroit Tigers farm system, slumps into the last empty stool at Mac’s Tap just after 9 PM, rain dripping off the frayed brim of his worn Toledo Mud Hens cap onto the scuffed linoleum. He’s spent 12 hours perched on cold metal bleachers watching 17-year-old lefties hurl fastballs into the dusk, his notebook crammed with scribbled stats and half-formed notes about pitch velocity and work ethic, and the only thing he wants right now is a cold PBR and 45 minutes of silence before he drives back to the soulless chain motel off I-75. He flags the bartender, nods at the tap, and shoves his notebook into the inner pocket of his grease-stained flannel, pointedly ignoring the group of rowdy construction workers yelling at the college football game on the mounted TV above the bar.
The stool next to him scrapes against the floor 10 minutes later. He tenses, ready to tell whoever it is there’s no room, before he glances over. The woman sliding into the seat carries a half-full glass of sweet tea, dark hair streaked with silver pulled back in a loose braid, a smudge of flour on the cuff of her denim jacket. Their elbows bump when she reaches for a stack of paper napkins to wipe a spot of spilled beer off the bar, and the jolt sends a warm tingle up his arm he hasn’t felt in years. He recognizes her before she opens her mouth: Lena Marquez, his ex-wife’s college roommate, the woman who used to crash on their couch every Thanksgiving, who’d laugh at his terrible baseball puns when his ex would roll her eyes and tell him to shut up. He hasn’t seen her since 2016, six months before his wife left him for a luxury real estate broker in Scottsdale, and for a split second he considers grabbing his jacket and bolting.
She turns to him before he can move, grinning so wide the corners of her eyes crinkle, and says his name like she’s been waiting to say it all day. He freezes, half-embarrassed he almost ran, half-confused why she’s even here, and mumbles a greeting back. She tells him she’s in town helping her aunt, the bar’s owner, recover from a hip replacement, that she saw his ex mention he was scouting the local high school showcase on Instagram earlier that week, and drove two hours from her Cleveland home just to see if he’d stop by Mac’s, the same dive he used to rave about when he and his ex were still married.
He shifts on his stool, unsure what to say. For 20 years, he’d carried a stupid, quiet crush on Lena, one he’d buried so deep he barely admitted it to himself, convinced it was a betrayal even when his marriage was falling apart. He
