Manny Ruiz is 52, has spent the last 16 years crisscrossing the Midwest in a dented silver Ford F-150, scouting left-handed high school pitchers for a single-A affiliate out of Tampa. He’s got a scar across his left eyebrow from a line drive that got away in ‘07, and a bad habit of holding grudges so long they take up more space in his truck than his coolers of sports drinks and dog-eared scouting binders. He’s avoided his hometown of Millersburg, Ohio, for 12 years straight, ever since his ex-wife left him for the team’s former GM at the very same summer festival he’s currently stuck at, thanks to a transmission that gave out three miles west of town the previous afternoon. The local mechanic told him parts wouldn’t be in for 48 hours, so he had no choice but to hang around, even if the thought of running into old acquaintances made his jaw tight.
Then someone slides into the plastic bench across from him, so close their bare knee bumps his under the table. He looks up ready to tell them to find another spot, and stops. She’s got dark hair pulled back in a messy braid strung with tiny sunflower beads, a smudge of powdered sugar on the edge of her jaw, and a neon pink apron slung over her cutoff shorts that says “Lila’s Pies: Worth the Calories” across the front. It takes him three full seconds to place her: Lila Marquez, his ex-wife’s younger cousin, the quiet kid he taught to throw a curveball in his backyard when she was 10, who used to beg him to bring her team bubble gum when he came home from road trips. She’s 38 now, all sharp grins and sharp elbows, nothing like the shy preteen he remembers.
She smirks when she sees he recognizes her, reaches across the table to steal a sip of his beer before he can protest. Her wrist brushes his knuckles when she sets the cup back down, he feels the rough callus on the side of her palm from rolling pie dough for 10 hours a day, and his throat goes dry for a reason he can’t immediately name. He’s already halfway to making an excuse to leave, already gearing up for the awkward small talk about his ex that always comes with running into her family, when she tilts her head and says “Don’t worry, I don’t talk to my cousin anymore. She’s still a total bitch for what she did to you.”
He blinks, shocked. No one’s ever said that out loud to him, not even his own family, who always tiptoed around the divorce like it was something he’d brought on himself. He laughs, short and surprised, and leans back in his bench, letting his cap ride up a little off his forehead. They talk for 45 minutes, first about the watery beer, then about the pie booth she runs out of her cottage on the edge of town, then about the left-handed pitcher he was on his way to scout in Pittsburgh, the kid who throws 92 with a curveball that drops like a stone off a cliff. She leans in when he talks, her knee still pressed to his under the table, never looks away when he’s speaking, like every word out of his mouth is more interesting than the chaos of the festival around them. When she reaches across the table to grab a napkin to wipe the sweat off her forehead, her shirt rides up a little at the waist, he catches a flash of a tiny baseball bat tattoo on her hip, and he has to look away for a second to catch his breath.
He knows this is stupid. He knows everyone in this tiny town would talk if they saw them together, knows the whole “ex-husband and the cousin” thing is the kind of gossip that would spread through Millersburg faster than wildfire in a dry cornfield. He feels that sharp twist of guilt in his gut, that stupid leftover loyalty to a woman who never gave a damn about him, warring with the warm buzz in his chest that he hasn’t felt since before the divorce, the quiet, unfamiliar feeling that someone’s actually seeing him, not just the guy his ex left for a man with a bigger salary.
She tilts her head when he goes quiet, smirks again, and says “I know you’re overthinking this. For the record, I’ve had a crush on you since I was 16 and you showed up to my high school softball championship to cheer me on when no one else from the family could make it. I don’t care what anyone says.” She reaches across the table, wraps her fingers around his wrist, her palm is warm and a little sticky from handling sugar all day, and he doesn’t pull away.
He hesitates for two more beats, thinks about the 12 years he’s spent avoiding this town, avoiding any kind of connection that might leave him vulnerable, thinks about how stupid it is to hold onto a grudge that’s only ever hurt him, not the people he’s angry at. He stands up, slings his scouting bag over his shoulder, and nods at her. She grins, stands up too, grabs the stack of empty pie tins she’d set on the ground next to her bench.
They stop at the fried dough stand on the way out of the festival, she orders one with extra cinnamon and powdered sugar, takes a bite so big sugar dusts her chin and the front of her apron. He reaches out without thinking, wipes the sugar off her jaw with his thumb, and before he can pull his hand away she leans in and licks the sugar off the tip of his thumb, slow, her dark eyes never leaving his. His skin buzzes where her lips touched him, and he forgets every single reason he thought this was a bad idea ten seconds earlier.
She unlocks the door to her beat-up forest green Subaru, tosses her pie tins and the half-eaten fried dough in the passenger seat, then leans against the doorframe and looks up at him, waiting. He walks around the front of the car, opens the passenger door, moves the fried dough to the cup holder, and slides into the seat next to her.
