Manny Ruiz, 52, minor league scout for the Cincinnati Reds farm system, leans against the chipped brick exterior of the small-town Ohio VFW post, condensation from his frosty plastic beer cup dripping onto the scuffed toes of his work boots. He’d ducked out of the annual summer corn boil 10 minutes prior, sick of overzealous baseball parents cornering him to beg for face time with their sons, his tattered duct-taped scouting notebook tucked under one arm. He still refuses to use the league-mandated scouting app, stubborn to a fault, still holds a grudge against his ex-wife who left him eight years prior for a SaaS salesman who’d convinced her paper records were “a relic of a dead era.” He hasn’t so much as bought a woman a drink in six years, convinced all modern connection is just a series of performative hoops he has no patience to jump through.
A golden retriever barreling past with a corn cob in its mouth sends a woman stepping sideways, her bare forearm brushing his bicep hard enough to make him slosh beer over the edge of his cup. She laughs, low and a little rough, like she smokes the occasional cigarette when no one’s watching, and holds up her own plate of butter-slathered corn to keep it out of the dog’s path. “Sorry about that,” she says, wiping a smudge of charcoal dust off her cutoff jean shorts, her white sneakers caked in grass stains. She’s got sun streaks in her dark brown hair, a thin scar slicing through her left eyebrow, and coconut sunscreen lingers in the air around her, mixed with the sharp tang of grill smoke and cut clover. She recognizes the Reds logo stitched into his cap, nods at the notebook peeking out under his arm. “My husband’s the head coach of the high school team. He wouldn’t stop ranting on the ride home about the old-school scout who takes notes with a pen instead of staring at a tablet all game.”
Manny tenses. The league cracked down hard on unsanctioned contact with coaching staff and their families two years prior, after a bribery scandal in Florida got three scouts fired for life. He should mumble a polite reply, grab his notebook, and head back to his motel 10 minutes out of town. Instead he says, “That umpire missed three strike calls in the sixth inning. Your husband had every right to yell.” She snorts, sits down on the cinder block bench next to him, their knees pressing together when a group of teen boys runs past yelling. She tells him the scar on her eyebrow is from a college soccer collision, that she only wears the flannel tied around her waist to hide the coffee stain on the back of her t-shirt, that her husband spends every single night holed up in their basement watching game film, hasn’t taken her on a date in three years. Every time someone he recognizes from the game walks past, he pulls the brim of his cap lower, but she leans in closer, her shoulder pressing against his, whispering jokes about the coach’s terrible dance moves at last year’s team banquet, her breath warm against his neck.
The coach yells her name from across the field, waving her over to help load coolers of Gatorade into the team van for the weekend away tournament. She stands, brushing corn silk off her legs, and leans down like she’s grabbing her discarded paper plate, instead tucking a crumpled neon napkin into the spiral binding of his notebook, her palm brushing the faded team logo on his t-shirt for half a second. “He leaves at 6 tomorrow,” she whispers, her lips brushing the edge of his ear so no one passing can hear. “The dive on Main has karaoke on Thursdays. I’ll be there at 8, if you’re sick of following everyone else’s rules for once.” She winks, grabs her plate, and walks away, her gold hoop earrings catching the pink light of the setting sun as she crosses the grass.
Manny sits there for 20 minutes after she’s gone, sipping the last of his now-warm beer, staring at the napkin where she scrawled her phone number in glitter pen, next to a tiny lopsided drawing of a baseball. He pulls the league code of conduct pamphlet out of his backpack, the one he taped to the inside of his scouting folder two years prior, and reads the line about unauthorized contact with coaching staff families one more time, then crumples it up and tosses it into the overflowing trash can next to the bench. He pulls his beat-up flip phone out of his jeans pocket, punches in each digit of her number slow and deliberate, and hits send on the text that says I’ll be there.
