Manny Ruiz, 53, has been a minor league baseball scout for 19 years, and he’s never once crossed the unwritten line of fraternizing with a prospect’s family. It’s a rule he’s clung to like a life raft since his divorce 8 years prior, when he learned the hard way that letting anyone past the wall he built around his work only leads to messy, inconvenient heartbreak. He drives 40,000 miles a year through small Southern towns, sleeps in motels with threadbare sheets, eats most meals at gas station delis, and tells himself he likes the quiet, the lack of expectations.
He’s parked at a dive bar off I-65 in northern Alabama, sweating through the back of his faded Ole Miss ball cap, nursing a lukewarm PBR, scribbling notes in his tattered scout notebook about 17-year-old Javi Morales, the left-handed pitcher he watched strike out 12 batters that afternoon. The bar smells like fried pickles and stale cigarette smoke, the jukebox spits out deep cuts from 90s country albums, and the neon Coors sign behind the bar flashes pink and blue across the scarred wood counter.
She sits down two stools over, and he recognizes her immediately. She was the woman in the stands behind home plate, screaming so loud her voice went hoarse when Javi struck out the side in the seventh inning, wearing a cut-off Javi’s high school team tee and work boots caked with mud. She orders bourbon neat, no ice, and when the bartender slides it to her she glances over, catches him staring at her, and smirks like she knew he’d been watching.
He freezes, fumbles with his pen, pretends to go back to his notes. But she leans over, elbows on the bar, and nods at the notebook. “You here to steal my boy for the big leagues?” Her voice is rough, like she smokes menthols when she’s stressed, and there’s a smudge of silver diamond dust on her left wrist, like she works at the small jewelry shop in town he passed on the way in.
He tells her he’s just a scout, nothing is guaranteed, and she snorts, says she knows, Javi’s been talking about getting scouted since he was 10 years old. They talk for 45 minutes, first about Javi’s stupid pre-game ritual of eating three sour straws before every inning, then about the way the town’s only grocery store jacks up prices on weekends, then about how she’s Lila, Javi’s stepmom, and her husband, Javi’s dad, took off three months prior with the family truck and half their savings, didn’t even leave a note.
He knows he should leave. He knows talking to her this long is a line he shouldn’t cross, that if his boss finds out he could get written up, that he’s just setting himself up for another mess he doesn’t want to clean up. But every time she laughs, she shifts a little closer, their knees brush under the bar, and he feels a jolt he hasn’t felt in almost a decade, warm and sharp at the same time. When she reaches across him to grab the bowl of salted peanuts off the bar next to his elbow, her chest brushes his shoulder for half a second, and she mumbles an apology but her grin says she’s not sorry at all.
He’s torn between the voice in his head screaming to pay his tab and drive to the next motel 30 miles down the road, and the way he can’t stop looking at the streak of gray in her braid, the calluses on her fingers from mucking out the horse stalls she keeps behind her trailer, the way she holds eye contact for two seconds longer than polite, like she’s daring him to make a move.
She finishes her bourbon, swipes a thumb across her lower lip, and asks him if he wants to come see the horses. Says Javi’s staying at his best friend’s house tonight, no one’s home but her. She touches his forearm when she asks, her palm warm through the thin fabric of his flannel shirt, and he can smell vanilla lotion mixed with the bourbon on her breath, and for the first time in 8 years, he doesn’t reach for his notebook, doesn’t make an excuse about work he has to do.
He pays their tabs, follows her out to her beat-up silver F150 parked at the edge of the lot. The air is thick and humid, crickets chirp loud in the oak trees lining the parking lot, and fireflies blink soft gold in the dark. She tosses him the keys, says he can drive if he wants, and he catches them easy, his fingers brushing hers for a split second. He notices the small silver baseball charm on her necklace, the one Javi got her for Mother’s Day last year, glinting in the glow of the streetlight.
He turns the key in the ignition, the truck rumbles to life, and she rests her hand on his thigh as he pulls out of the parking lot.
