Manny Ruiz, 53, has spent the last 11 years scouting low-A baseball players across the southeast, logging 40,000 miles a year in his dented 2017 Ford F-150, his passenger seat perpetually stacked with scouting binders, sunflower seed shells, and vintage minor league ball caps he picks up at thrift stores. His biggest flaw, per his sister who nags him monthly about dating, is that he’s built his entire life around avoiding anything unrelated to tracking exit velocity and infield foot speed. When his wife left him 8 years prior, she’d yelled the same thing over her shoulder as she drove away, and he’d decided to own it instead of fixing it. No small talk, no dinner dates, no pointless conversations about shared hobbies that would fizzle out in three weeks. He was fine.
He was fine, that is, until he pulled into the gravel lot of Mack’s Tap in rural south Georgia on a rainy Tuesday night, post-game, still buzzing from watching a 19-year-old shortstop with a cannon for an arm turn a double play that would’ve made Ozzie Smith proud. The bar smelled exactly the way he remembered it from 20 years prior: fried dill pickles, cheap PBR, and the faint, sweet tang of cherry Skoal from the old guys playing pool in the back corner. He slid onto the worn vinyl stool at the far end of the bar, flipped open his scouting notebook, and was halfway through scribbling a note about the shortstop’s tendency to rush his throws to first when a cold bottle of beer slid in front of him, followed by a basket of fried pickles, still steaming.
“Extra dill, like you used to order.” The voice was low, warm, familiar, and when he looked up, Lila Mae Carter was leaning against the bar across from him, her forearm three inches from his, a tiny smile playing at the corner of her mouth. He’d forgotten the scar above her left eyebrow, the one she’d gotten tripping over a cooler at a 2001 post-game cookout he’d attended with his then-wife. She was 49 now, her dark hair streaked with silver at the temples, wearing a faded Georgia Bulldogs flannel and work boots caked with mud, and he could smell lavender hand lotion mixing with the fryer grease clinging to her sleeves. Her eye contact didn’t waver, didn’t dart away like most people’s did when he gave them his usual gruff, unsmiling hello.
He froze for half a second, the pen hovering over his notebook. He’d avoided this bar for 8 years, specifically because he knew Lila ran it now, knew she was close with his ex-wife, knew getting anywhere near her would break one of his longest-standing rules. He’d told himself a hundred times that anyone tied to his old life was off limits, that getting involved would only dig up all the garbage he’d spent years shoving down. But then she reached across the bar to wipe a spot of syrup off the counter next to his elbow, her wrist brushing his bare skin, and the hair on the back of his neck stood up.
They talked for two hours, off and on, between her serving regulars and restocking the cooler under the bar. She teased him about the frayed edges of his scouting notebook, said she’d seen him sitting in the stands that afternoon, scribbling so hard she thought he’d poke a hole through the paper. He learned she’d gotten divorced three years prior, that the shortstop he’d been scouting was her nephew, that she still kept a box of old minor league merch he’d given his ex-wife back in the day, tucked on a shelf in her office upstairs. Every time she passed him a napkin or topped off his beer, her fingers brushed his, deliberate, not accidental, and he bounced between wanting to lean into the contact and bailing out the front door before he did something stupid.
Closing time hit at 1 a.m., the last of the regulars stumbling out into the rain, and Manny’s stomach dropped when he turned the key in his truck’s ignition and got nothing but a dead, clicking noise. He’d left his dome light on when he ran into the bar, a stupid mistake he never made, and he stood in the rain for five minutes, cussing under his breath, before Lila banged on the bar window and waved him back inside.
“Got a couch upstairs,” she said, wiping her hands on her jeans, rain dripping off the brim of his ball cap onto the floor between them. “Towels are clean, no bugs. No need to call a tow truck in this downpour.”
He hesitated for a full minute, every rule he’d made for himself screaming in his head, then nodded. The stairs creaked under their boots as they climbed, and halfway up the last flight, Lila tripped over a loose step, her arms flailing, and he caught her by the waist, his hands wrapping around the soft, worn flannel of her shirt. She steadied herself, one hand flat on his chest, and he could feel her heartbeat through the thin fabric of his t-shirt, fast, matching his own. She didn’t pull away, didn’t apologize, just looked up at him, her eyes glinting in the dim porch light.
“I’ve had a crush on you since the first time you walked in here with her,” she said, quiet enough that the rain tapping on the metal roof almost drowned it out. “Waited 20 years for you to stop being so stubborn.”
He didn’t overthink it, didn’t run down the list of reasons this was a bad idea, didn’t remind himself that he was supposed to leave for Alabama the next morning to scout a pitcher. He leaned down and kissed her, slow, and she tasted like root beer hard candy and the peppermint gum she’d been chewing all night, her hand coming up to cup the back of his neck, her fingers tangling in the short, graying hair at his nape. His scouting notebook was forgotten on the bar downstairs, the list of players he needed to see next week pushed to the very back of his mind, the shield he’d built around himself for 8 years crumbling so fast he didn’t even have time to protest. He laces his fingers through hers and leads her toward the couch, the low hum of the bar’s walk-in cooler fading behind them.
