Rafe Mendez, 53, has spent the last 12 years living out of a dented Ford F-150 with a Braves decal peeling off the back window, driving between high school baseball fields and small-town dugouts as a minor league scout for the Atlanta Braves organization. His only consistent flaw is the grudge he carries against his ex-wife, who left him for a 28-year-old high school PE coach the week they were supposed to close on a lake house. He’s avoided every town event she’s had a hand in since, which meant he’d skipped the annual winter beer festival every year until his buddy Jimmie called, swearing she was out of town visiting her sister in Florida, no risk of running into her.
He’s leaning against a repurposed oak barrel table near the back of the brewery, sipping a thick peanut butter porter that coats his tongue like melted candy, scuffed cowboy boots propped on the lower rung, when someone knocks hard into his elbow. Beer sloshes over the rim of the plastic cup, splattering the sleeve of his gray plaid flannel. He looks up, ready to snap, and stops. The woman in front of him is 32, curly auburn hair pulled back in a messy bun, wearing a faded Johnny Cash hoodie and ripped jeans, and he recognizes her immediately from the framed photos his ex used to keep on the kitchen counter: Lila, the PE coach’s stepdaughter, the one who’d been in college when the divorce went through.
She laughs, sheepish, dabs at the wet spot on his sleeve with a crumpled napkin she pulls out of her jacket pocket. Her fingers brush his forearm, light as a sparrow’s wing, and he feels a jolt run up his arm that has nothing to do with the cold. “Sorry about that,” she says, holding eye contact longer than casual politeness calls for, the corner of her mouth tugging up in a smirk that looks like she knows exactly who he is. “Dad’s got me making the rounds to meet all his town friends, I got distracted by the guy in the elf costume selling fudge.”
Rafe tenses, half expecting his ex to round the corner any second, half expecting Lila to call him the bitter old asshole her aunt always complained about. But she just leans against the barrel next to him, shoulder brushing his when a group of rowdy college kids pushes past, and he can smell cinnamon and pine on her hair, sharp and warm against the smell of hops and fried cheese curds in the air. She teases him about the grudge, says she’s heard both sides of the divorce story, thinks both her stepdad and his ex are a little too obsessed with being the perfect small-town power couple to be any fun. She tells him she’s in town for a week visiting from Nashville, where she designs album covers for indie country artists, and she’s already bored out of her mind going to PTA potlucks.
He’s torn for the first hour they talk. Every logical part of his brain screams that this is a terrible idea, that if anyone sees them together the whole town will be talking by breakfast, that he’s old enough to be her dad, that the last thing he needs is more drama tied to his ex’s family. But she’s sharp, makes fun of the terrible custom baseball socks he’s wearing under his jeans, asks him questions about scouting that no one has bothered to ask him in years, listens like she actually cares when he tells her about the 17-year-old kid in Tuscaloosa he just found who can throw 98 mph and has a curveball that makes batters trip over their own feet. When she dabs a fleck of fried cheese off his jaw with her thumb, he doesn’t pull away.
They sneak out to the old loading dock behind the brewery an hour later, when the crowd gets too loud and a guy who played high school ball with Rafe starts yelling about the 2001 Braves season. The wind off the nearby lake bites at his cheeks, and he slips his flannel off and hands it to her when she shivers. She wraps it around her shoulders, leans into his side when a gust blows harder, her hip pressed to his, her hand brushing his on the wooden rail of the dock. He kisses her first, slow, and she kisses back, tastes like cherry hard seltzer and mint, her hands tangling in the hair at the nape of his neck. He pulls back for half a second, says this is messed up, and she laughs against his mouth, says who cares, she’s leaving in two days, no one has to know if they don’t want them to.
They spend the next 48 hours holed up in his cabin on the edge of town, save for a drive up to the Blue Ridge overlook at sunset and a 2am run to the diner for chocolate chip pancakes and black coffee. He tells her about the lake house they were supposed to buy, about how he stopped fishing after the divorce because it was their thing, and she tells him about her mom who died when she was 16, about how her stepdad is a good guy but he never really gets her. No awkward silences, no talk of commitments, no mention of his ex or her dad.
He drives her to the Greyhound station at noon on Sunday, helps her load her duffel bag into the undercarriage of the bus. She hands him back his flannel before she climbs the steps, slips a scrap of paper with her number scrawled on it into the breast pocket, tells him if he’s ever passing through Nashville for a scouting trip, he should call, no strings attached. He stands there until the bus pulls out of the parking lot and turns onto the highway, then pulls the scrap of paper out of his pocket, types the number into his phone, and sends her a text with a photo of the kid from Tuscaloosa’s pitching stats before he even gets back in his truck.
