Manny Rios is 53, a minor league baseball scout who’s logged over 270,000 miles on his 2016 Ford F-150 crisscrossing southern Missouri hunting for overlooked high school and JUCO pitching talent. His biggest flaw? He’s clung to a self-imposed no-dating rule for eight straight years, ever since his wife packed her bags and moved to Phoenix with a real estate agent she met at a pickleball tournament. He’s convinced all post-50 romance is just awkward, performative garbage, a race to list your ailments and grandkids before the first appetizer hits the table. The only social event he makes a point to attend every year is the local VFW’s summer catfish fry, mostly for the all-you-can-eat okra and the cheap draft beer that tastes exactly like it did when he was 19 and playing left field for a community college team outside St. Louis.
He’s leaning against the dented metal beer cooler, half-empty Pabst in one hand, grease smudge on the knee of his worn Wranglers from changing his truck’s oil that morning, when she steps up beside him. She’s Lena Hart, the 49-year-old nurse practitioner who took over the small walk-in clinic on Main Street four months prior. He’d avoided her for weeks after he’d come in for a cortisone shot in his throwing shoulder back in May, flustered by how close she’d stood while pressing on the sore joint, how she’d teased him for flinching like a kid getting a vaccine. He’d written off the jittery feeling in his chest as a side effect of the shot, told himself she was way too sharp, too easy with a joke, too unapologetically loud for a guy who eats frozen burritos for dinner three nights a week and keeps his ex-wife’s old mixing bowls in the back of his cabinet out of pure laziness.
She reaches past him for a black cherry seltzer from the cooler, her bare shoulder brushing the faded cotton of his Grizzlies cap, and he can smell lavender hand lotion and fried catfish on her shirt, sweet and sharp and warm. She holds eye contact longer than polite, a half-smile tugging at the corner of her mouth, and says she’s been meaning to follow up on his shoulder, asks if he’s still waking up sore after long drives. He mumbles something about it being fine, tries to step back to give her space, and trips over a folding chair someone left behind him. She catches his wrist before he can pitch sideways into a tray of hushpuppies, her fingers calloused at the tips from the vegetable garden she posts about on the town Facebook page, warm even through the thin cotton of his work shirt. He feels his ears go red, and he’s halfway to making an excuse to leave when she laughs, loud and unselfconscious, and says all the other picnic tables are full, asks if he minds if she sits with him.
He wants to say no, wants to stick to his stupid rule, wants to go home and watch the Royals game and fall asleep on the couch like he does every Saturday night, but he nods instead. They sit across from each other at a splintered pine table, citronella torches flickering between them, a cover band down the field fumbling through a John Mellencamp deep cut, kids screaming as they chase fireflies through the grass. She asks about the beat-up leather notebook sticking out of his back pocket, and he pulls it out, shows her the scribbled stat sheets, the notes he jots down about a pitcher’s windup, the crumpled ticket stubs from games he’s attended over the last decade. She leans across the table to get a better look, her knee brushing his under the edge, and he can hear the crinkle of her paper plate as she shifts, ice clinking in her seltzer can, the faint buzz of mosquitoes circling the torches. She points at a note he wrote about a 17-year-old lefty from a tiny town outside Poplar Bluff, says her nephew plays outfield on that same high school team, and they spend 20 minutes trading stories about how bad the concession stand hot dogs are at that field, how the lights always cut out in the seventh inning if it’s humid out.
He’s so wrapped up in talking he barely notices when the crowd thins out, when the band packs up their gear, when the sun dips completely below the tree line and the only light comes from the remaining torches and the string lights strung between the pavilion posts. She dabs at her mouth with a napkin, and he spots a smudge of barbecue sauce on her chin, fights the urge to reach across and wipe it off. She says she’s got an extra ticket to the Grizzlies preseason game in Memphis next weekend, that her brother was supposed to go with her but bailed last minute to go on a camping trip with his girlfriend. She says she noticed his Grizzlies cap when he came into the clinic, figured he might be interested, and she’s been working up the nerve to ask him for three weeks. He almost says no, almost spits out the dumb rule he’s hidden behind for eight years, almost tells her he’s not good at this, that he’ll probably bore her to death talking about pitching mechanics the whole drive. But then he looks at her, biting the corner of her lower lip, her sneakers propped on the lower rung of the picnic table bench, a scar snaking up her left wrist from a mountain biking accident she’d mentioned offhand earlier, and he says yes.
They walk out to the parking lot together, the grass damp under his work boots, crickets chirping so loud they almost drown out the sound of their footsteps. He offers to walk her to her car, a beat-up dark green Subaru Outback with a “Protect Our Ozark Rivers” sticker on the back bumper and a dog crate in the back seat for her rescue hound. She stops at the driver’s side door, turns to face him, leans up and presses a quick, soft kiss to his cheek, the faint taste of the peach pie she ate for dessert lingering on her skin when she pulls back. She says she’ll text him the details Monday morning, reminds him to stretch his shoulder every morning before he gets in his truck, and climbs into the car. He stands there in the parking lot long after her taillights disappear down the road, holding his hand up to the spot on his cheek where she kissed him, and realizes his shoulder doesn’t hurt at all for the first time in six months.
