Moe Hargrove, 52, has scouted high school and low-A minor league baseball for the Carolina League for 22 years. His hands are crisscrossed with calluses from swinging test bats with prospects, his forearms dusted with sun spots from 100-hour weeks in bleachers across the Southeast, and he’s got a faded 2016 Durham Bulls cap pulled low over his salt-and-pepper hair most days. His biggest flaw, the one his kid sister teases him about every Thanksgiving, is that he’s shut down every possible casual connection with a woman since his wife Linda died of ovarian cancer seven years prior. He’s turned down setups, ignored flirty waitresses, even left his favorite BBQ joint for three months after the owner tried to fix him up with her cousin. It felt like cheating, like he was erasing the 19 years he and Linda spent driving beat-up SUVs up and down I-85, eating gas station burritos, yelling at umpires from the stands together.
He’s perched at the end of the bar at a dive outside Fayetteville on a sticky late August night, bourbon neat on the counter in front of him, flipping through his scouting notebook, when he drops his ballpoint pen. He bends to grab it at the exact same time as the woman sitting two stools over. Their hands brush first, calloused rough against soft, lotion-smooth knuckles, then their foreheads knock together gently when they both straighten up. She laughs, a warm, throaty sound that cuts through the jukebox’s Johnny Cash and the roar of a group of construction guys yelling over a pool game. He yanks his hand back like he touched a hot grill, mumbles a gruff thanks, and grabs the pen, already planning to chug the rest of his bourbon and bolt.
She doesn’t let him. She slides onto the stool next to him, not close enough to crowd, but close enough that he can smell coconut shampoo and the faint, sweet tang of peach hard seltzer on her breath, her denim-clad knee brushing his scuffed work boot when she shifts to face him. She says she’s been sitting two rows behind him at the park all week, watching him scribble notes every time her son Javi, the 19-year-old shortstop for the Fayetteville Woodpeckers, makes a play. She’s 47, recently divorced, drove six hours from Charleston to watch his last home stand before he ships off to fall instructional league in Arizona, and she recognized the league logo stitched on his backpack the first day.
Moe’s first instinct is to make an excuse, say he’s got to get up early to review film, but she’s leaning in a little, pointing at the open page of his notebook, where he’s scrawled Javi’s name with three stars next to it, a note about his quick release and tendency to rush throws to first. She says she used to coach Javi’s little league team, knows exactly that flaw, has been yelling at him to slow down his feet since he was 10. Her shoulder brushes his when she points, and he doesn’t flinch away, for the first time in seven years. He finds himself talking, telling her about the first time he saw Javi play at a high school showcase two years prior, telling her about Linda, how she used to sit next to him in the bleachers, keep score, sneak him peanut M&Ms when he was stressed about a prospect’s draft stock.
He’s halfway through a story about Linda yelling at an umpire for calling the 12-year-old Javi out at second at a travel tournament they’d stumbled on, when a group of drunk college kids stumble in from the rain that started falling 10 minutes prior. One slams into the back of her stool, and she lurches forward, right into his side, her hand splaying across his chest to catch herself. For a second he freezes, every muscle in his body tensed, ready to pull away, but then he looks down at her. Her hazel eyes are flecked with gold, a faint scar across her left cheek from a softball accident when she was 16, her lip pulled up in a half-embarrassed, half-amused smile. He covers her hand with his, calloused palm against her knuckles, and doesn’t let go.
He admits it then, quiet enough only she can hear over the noise of the bar, that he hasn’t let a woman get this close since Linda died, that he’d spent years convincing himself any kind of connection meant he was forgetting her. She nods, says she gets it, that she’d sworn off dating entirely after her ex left her for his 26-year-old paralegal two years prior, that she’d driven up to Fayetteville thinking it’d just be her and Javi for the week, no surprises. The rain taps against the bar windows, the jukebox switches to an old George Strait track, and the bartender sets a fresh basket of fried pickles on the counter between them without them asking.
He asks her if she wants to get pancakes at the diner down the street from the park the next morning, before the 1pm game. She says yes, scribbles her number on the back of Javi’s game ticket from that night, smudges the ink a little when she hands it to him. He tucks it into the front of his scouting notebook, right next to the tiny polaroid of Linda he keeps taped to the inside cover, the one where she’s wearing a Bulls cap, holding a beer, grinning at the camera from the bleachers. He walks her to her beat-up silver pickup truck in the parking lot, the rain slowed to a light mist, crickets chirping in the grass along the curb. She squeezes his bicep before she climbs in, says she’ll be at the diner at 8 sharp, don’t be late.
He stands there for a minute after she pulls out, the cool mist settling on his face, the faint smell of coconut still clinging to his flannel shirt. He doesn’t feel guilty, doesn’t feel like he’s betraying Linda, like he’d been scared he would for seven years. He feels light, like the heavy weight he’s been carrying in his chest since the day she died got a little smaller, a little easier to hold. He flips open his scouting notebook to the page with Javi’s stats, writes her name, Lila, under the note about his slow feet, and draws a tiny, wobbly star next to it.
