Manny Ruiz, 52, has spent the last three years treating his Akron neighborhood like a hotel he only visits between scouting trips. As a contracted minor league pitcher scout, he’s on the road 8 months out of the year, sleeping in motel beds that smell like old cigarette smoke and laundry detergent, logging radar gun readings on high school lefties who can hit 94 mph but forget how to throw a curveball with runners on base. When he’s home, he eats frozen meatloaf dinners, watches 90s Indians games on VHS, and avoids every block party, cookout, and holiday invite his neighbors slide under his front door. His only flaw, if you ask his next door neighbor Jan, is that he’s convinced anyone who tries to be nice to him is only pitying him for losing his wife to ovarian cancer back in 2020. Jan shoves a paper plate loaded with ribs and potato salad in his hand at 6pm on the last Saturday of August, and physically drags him to the street-wide end-of-summer cookout before he can come up with an excuse to leave.
He’s leaning against a stop sign, debating if he can sneak back to his house before anyone notices he’s gone, when he spots her. She’s the woman who moved into the old blue Victorian three blocks over two months ago, the one he’s only ever waved at from his beat-up Ford F-150 when he’s pulling into his driveway at 2am after a 12 hour drive back from a tournament in Indiana. She’s wearing a faded 1997 World Series Indians jersey that hangs loose on her shoulders, cutoff denim shorts, and bare feet, a smudge of charcoal streaked across her left cheek from manning the hot dog grill for the swarm of kids running around the street. He walks over to the keg to grab a beer, and their hands brush when they both reach for the same frosty solo cup of pale ale. Her skin is cool from holding a can of seltzer a minute prior, her nails chipped with sage green polish, a tiny tattoo of a book stitched with baseball laces peeking out from under the cuff of her jersey sleeve.
Her name is Lena. She tells him she’s a former children’s librarian, just finalized her divorce from Roger Hale, the new general manager of the RubberDucks, the team Manny has scouted for since 2016. They haven’t announced the split yet, she says, because Roger is heading up a youth sports charity gala next month and doesn’t want bad press tanking donations. Manny’s throat goes tight. Getting involved with the GM’s ex-wife could tank his contract, the one that pays his mortgage, the one that lets him keep doing the only job he’s ever loved besides being a husband. He tells himself he should walk away, that he’s just bored, that he’s betraying his wife even thinking about talking to another woman for longer than five minutes. But she laughs at his bad joke about minor league dugout bathrooms being a biohazard, and her laugh is rough and loud, not the soft, pitying chuckles he’s gotten used to from people who know his backstory. They lean against the thick trunk of the oak tree at the end of the street, their shoulders brushing every time one of them shifts, and he can smell coconut sunscreen and grilled pineapple on her shirt, can hear the hum of crickets starting up over the noise of the kids screaming as they chase each other with water guns. She holds eye contact with him for three full beats longer than is polite, and he feels heat crawl up the back of his neck, the same buzz he gets when he spots a kid on the mound who he knows could make the big leagues one day.
A group of neighbors walks over then, including Dave, who runs ticket sales for the RubberDucks and has been Manny’s contact at the team for four years. Manny tenses, ready to step a foot away from Lena, make it clear they’re just talking, when she laces her fingers through his, squeezes his calloused palm tight. She tells the group they’ve been seeing each other for a few weeks, that she and Roger split amicably six months ago, no drama, no hard feelings. Dave snorts, says Roger told him the split was final months ago, didn’t want to spread her business around, as long as Manny still keeps finding those cheap left-handed pitching prospects, no one in the front office cares who he’s dating. The knot in Manny’s chest unravels so fast he almost laughs out loud. He runs his thumb over the back of her hand, the rough calluses from 20 years of holding a radar gun catching on the soft skin of her knuckles, and he doesn’t even care that half the neighborhood is watching.
The sun dips below the rooftops an hour later, the kids pile into their minivans with sticky faces, and the remaining neighbors drag a rusted fire pit to the middle of the street, stack it with logs. Lena pulls him down to sit on a frayed plaid picnic blanket someone left out, rests her head on his shoulder, and he passes her a s’more he roasted over the fire. She gets a glob of melted marshmallow on her bottom lip, and he wipes it off with his thumb before he can overthink the move. She kisses the pad of his thumb, slow and soft, before he can pull it away.
