Rafe Mendez, 53, minor league baseball scout for the Columbus Clippers, leans against a splintered oak picnic table and stares at the congealed chili in his paper bowl. The left-handed pitching prospect he drove four hours to watch that morning blew out his UCL in the second inning, his season over before Rafe could even finish his first gas station coffee of the day. He’s supposed to head out Sunday at dawn, no detours, no distractions, that’s the rule he’s lived by for eight years, ever since his ex-wife left him for a high school math teacher who never missed a dinner or a birthday or a weekend trip to the lake.
He shifts his weight to reach for a napkin and his elbow knocks a metal tray held by a woman with streaks of silver in her dark braid, half a dozen cornbread muffins tipping off the edge. He catches one mid-fall, his palm brushing hers as he passes it back. Her skin is cool, calloused along the fingertips from reshelving hardcovers, he notices, before he meets her eyes. Hazel, with flecks of gold, crinkled at the corners like she laughs more than most people he knows. “Well,” she says, wiping a crumb of cornbread off his flannel sleeve, “I’ve been trying to drop one on a cute stranger all night. Guess my luck finally turned.”
He knows he should brush it off, mumble an apology, head back to his motel room to fill out his scouting report. He doesn’t do small talk with locals, doesn’t let anyone get close enough to ask why he’s never in one place more than three days. But she sits down next to him, her shoulder pressing warm against his bicep through the thin flannel, and hands him a muffin still warm from the oven. He can smell coconut shampoo on her hair, mixed with the wood smoke from the cookoff grills and the cut grass of the fire department’s field. She tells him her name is Lena, she runs the town’s only bookstore, her husband was a volunteer firefighter who died three years prior on a call for a barn fire out on the county line. “Everyone around here still treats me like I’m gonna shatter if I so much as smile at a man,” she says, leaning in so her mouth is close to his ear, the sound of her voice low enough only he can hear it over the chatter of the crowd. “Kinda makes you want to do something stupid, just to prove you still can.”
The thought makes his chest tight. He’s spent eight years avoiding stupid, avoiding anything that doesn’t involve radar guns and pitching statistics and cheap motel beds. He tells himself he’s not here for this, that he’s just bored after the prospect flamed out, that he’ll only end up letting her down. But when she asks if he wants to come back to her place above the bookstore to try the peach pie she baked that morning, he says yes before he can talk himself out of it.
Her apartment smells like old paper and cinnamon, string lights strung above the back porch overlooking the town’s main street. Crickets chirp in the bushes lining the sidewalk, a distant siren wails once from the fire station before fading out. She pours him a glass of sweet tea, sits next to him on the porch swing, and when she reaches up to brush a smudge of chili off his jaw, her thumb lingers on the rough stubble of his cheek. He doesn’t pull away. He kisses her slow, no rush, can taste the peppermint gum she’s been chewing and the hint of cinnamon from the cornbread on her tongue, and for the first time in years, he doesn’t feel like he’s running late to something.
He leaves at 5 a.m. the next day, doesn’t wake her, leaves a signed minor league baseball on her kitchen counter next to her coffee pot, scrawled his cell number on the sweet spot and a note that says he’ll be back in four weeks to scout a catcher out of the local high school. He hits the highway, turns up the old Johnny Cash cassette he’s had in his truck since he was 22, and for the first time in eight years, he’s not counting the miles until his next assignment, he’s counting the days until he comes back.
