Rudy Galvan is 53, a minor league baseball scout who’s spent the last 12 years driving up and down the East Coast, crisscrossing small town stadiums to spot left-handed pitchers with sharp curveballs and outfielders who don’t freeze when a pop fly heads for the gap. He’s got a strict, self-imposed rule against casual connections, honed over 8 years of being single after his wife left him for a small town high school football coach. No small talk, no sharing personal details, no letting anyone get close enough to leave a mark. This summer he’s camped out in a dented 2 bedroom cottage on Cape Cod, here for the collegiate summer league that spits out half the first round draft picks every year. The only other rental on the lot is occupied by a woman he’s actively avoided for three weeks, ever since he spotted the last name “Carter” printed on the side of her moving box, the same as his old college teammate he’d gotten in a fistfight with 25 years prior over a coveted scouting gig neither of them ended up getting. They hadn’t spoken since.
It’s 9pm on a Tuesday, the night’s game ran two extra innings, the humidity hangs thick enough to drink, and Rudy is slouched in his usual booth at the Schooner, the local dive where peanut shells stick to the scuffed linoleum and the jukebox only plays country recorded before 1990. He’s halfway through his second light beer when someone’s elbow knocks his shoulder, hard enough to slosh a drop of beer over the rim of his glass. He looks up, and it’s her. She’s wearing cut off jean shorts and a faded Tom Petty tee, her hair pulled back in a messy braid, a smudge of dark ink on her left cheekbone. She smells like lavender and old paper, the dry, dusty scent you get from handling 100-year-old leather bound books all day. She holds up a stack of envelopes, smirks, and says “You keep getting your mail sent to my place. Figured you’d want this one, it says ‘urgent scouting report’ on the front.”
Rudy freezes, his first instinct is to mumble a thanks, grab the mail, and bolt back to his cottage before he has to make conversation. But she’s already sliding into the booth across from him, setting her own hazy IPA on the Formica table, her bare knee brushing his jeans under the edge. He tenses up, old guilt pricking at the back of his throat. He knows he shouldn’t be here talking to her, that Carter would lose his mind if he found out, that he’s breaking every one of his own stupid rules. But she’s already talking, telling him she’s a traveling book restorer, here for two months fixing a collection of 19th century whaling journals at the local historical society, that she left Carter 10 years ago, that he was a selfish drunk who never let her pursue her own career. She laughs when he admits he recognized her last name, that he’d been avoiding her because of the decades old fight. “Oh, that,” she says, leaning forward so her elbows rest on the table, their faces only a foot apart now, he can see flecks of gold in her warm brown eyes, “Carter still rants about you every time he gets drunk at family reunions. Says you were the only guy who ever called him out on his bullshit.”
The jukebox switches to Patsy Cline’s *Crazy*, the waitress drops off a plate of fried pickles at their table without asking, nods like she knew they’d want them. The salt crunches loud when Rudy picks one up, he can hear the distant crash of the ocean through the bar’s open back door, the faint chatter of a group of fishermen at the counter. She reaches for a pickle at the same time he does, their fingers brushing for half a second, and he feels a jolt go up his arm, the kind he hasn’t felt since he was 19 sneaking into his college girlfriend’s dorm after curfew. He tells her the full story of the fight, how Carter had lied on his job application, claimed he’d scouted three years of minor league when he’d only ever coached a Little League team for one season, how Rudy had called him out in front of the hiring manager, Carter had punched him square in the jaw, they’d both been thrown out and lost the shot at the job. She nods, says that tracks, Carter always lied when he thought it would get him ahead.
She finishes her beer, pushes the empty glass to the side, and slides in next to him on the booth bench, her shoulder pressing warm against his through his thin cotton tee. “The fireflies are out thick by the dunes tonight,” she says, her voice low like she’s sharing a secret no one else in the bar can hear, “You wanna walk back with me? Or are you gonna keep hiding out in this booth pretending you don’t want to?” He hesitates for half a second, the old voice in his head screaming not to get involved, not to risk getting hurt again, not to cross a line that feels so wrong it’s right. But then he looks at her, the ink smudge still on her cheek, the way she’s smiling like she already knows the answer, and he nods. He slaps a 20 on the table to cover both their tabs, tucks his scouting report under his arm, and follows her out the door.
The air is cooler now, dewy grass sticking to the toes of his white sneakers, fireflies blinking on and off in the dune grass like tiny floating lights, the ocean rumbling low and steady in the background. Their hands brush twice, three times, before she laces her fingers through his, her palm calloused from handling book spines and leather binding, fitting perfectly in his bigger, rougher hand, calloused from gripping baseball bats and steering wheels for decades. He doesn’t pull away. They stop at the split between their two cottages, she turns to him, leans up, and kisses him soft on the corner of his mouth, says she’ll see him tomorrow, if he wants. He nods, says he does, more sure of that than he’s been of anything in years. He walks into his cottage, sets the scouting report on the kitchen counter, and leans against the door for a minute, grinning like an idiot.
He can’t remember the last time he didn’t mind the sound of someone else’s footsteps matching his own.
