Manny Ruiz, 51, minor league baseball scout for the Cincinnati Reds farm system, wipes rain off the brim of his faded 1994 college ball cap as he pushes through the screen door of The Dugout, the only dive bar within 15 miles of the small Ohio high school he’d spent the day at scouting left-handed pitchers. He’s got a crumpled stack of player stats in the pocket of his waxed canvas jacket, a blister on his left heel from walking the bleachers for 6 hours, and a firm rule against fraternizing with anyone connected to the schools he visits, one he’s stuck to for 12 years on the job, ever since a booster’s wife flirted with him at a post-game cookout and word got back to the head coach, costing him a shot at scouting a top draft pick. He also hasn’t pursued anything even close to a relationship since his own divorce 8 years prior, when his ex-wife left him for a corporate lawyer who didn’t spend 200 days a year on the road. He tells himself he’s better off alone, that casual connections are just a waste of time he could be spending on scouting. It’s his biggest flaw, this stubborn refusal to let anyone get close.
He orders bourbon neat, leans his elbows on the scuffed linoleum bar, and lets the hum of the jukebox (old Johnny Cash, no modern pop, thank God) wash over him. Two stools over, a woman in a navy waterproof rain jacket and scuffed white tennis sneakers taps his forearm with the edge of a salted peanut bowl to get his attention. Her nail polish is chipped pale pink, there’s a smudge of grass stain on the cuff of her high-waisted jeans, and when he meets her eyes, he recognizes her immediately: Lila Carter, Jake Carter’s ex-wife, the girl he’d met at his college team’s end-of-season banquet back when she was 19, sharp as a tack and way too good for his loud, cheating former teammate.
He hadn’t heard she moved to this town. Hadn’t heard her divorce finalized last month, either, until she says it offhand, passing him the peanut bowl so their fingers brush for half a second, and he feels the faint callus on her index finger from decades of competitive tennis, a detail he’d noticed once back at that banquet, when she’d beaten three of their baseball team’s players at cornhole in a row. She holds his gaze two beats longer than polite, licks a fleck of salt off her lower lip after taking a sip of her frozen margarita, and he feels the back of his neck warm up, the same stupid flutter he’d felt that night 32 years prior, the one he’d stomped down hard because she was dating his teammate.
A group of rowdy teen baseball players piles through the door 20 minutes later, yelling about walk-off home runs and spilling orange soda on the tile floor, and Lila shifts closer to him to get out of their way, her shoulder pressing firm against his bicep. He can smell coconut shampoo and rain on her jacket, mixed with the faint tang of lime from her drink, and he almost pulls away, stuck on that old professional rule, stuck on the voice in his head that says he’s too old for this, too set in his ways, too likely to leave town in three days and ghost her like every other half-hearted casual fling he’s entertained since his divorce.
But Lila laughs at his dumb story about Jake getting so drunk at that 1994 banquet he tried to ride the team’s bulldog mascot costume like a horse, and her hand rests on his forearm when she laughs, warm and steady, and he can’t bring himself to move. She tells him about catching Jake cheating with the high school booster club president last fall, about how she’d filed for divorce the next day, bought the small horse farm on the edge of town with her own savings, and hasn’t regretted a single choice since. She leans in when she tells him the part about dumping all of Jake’s custom golf clubs in the town lake, her mouth an inch from his ear, her breath warm against his neck, and he doesn’t pull away. For the first time in 8 years, he doesn’t make an excuse to leave, doesn’t tell himself he’s too busy, doesn’t remind himself she’s off limits.
He admits he’d thought about her off and on for years, that he’d told Jake once she was too good for him, that Jake had laughed and called him a sucker. She smiles, her thumb brushing the frayed edge of his old ball cap, and says she’d thought about him too, had wondered where he’d ended up after college, had asked Jake about him a dozen times over the years and Jake always brushed her off.
