Marlon Pruitt, 53, is a minor league baseball scout who’s logged 180,000 miles on his beat-up 2017 Ford F-150 in the last three years, chasing left-handed pitchers and switch hitters across small-town Ohio, Kentucky, and West Virginia. He’s stubborn to a fault, has avoided every family barbecue and community event his sister has begged him to attend since his wife left him eight years prior, and is convinced the only good conversation is one that involves pitch velocity and batting average against left-handed relief pitching. He’s only at the Meigs County Fair on that humid August evening because a 19-year-old southpaw from Pomeroy he’s been tracking for six months is competing in the amateur home run derby, and he wants to see if the kid can hit for power as well as he can paint the corner of the strike zone.
He’s leaning against the chain-link fence bordering the beer tent, holding a lukewarm IPA that tastes more like citrus dish soap than actual beer, when he smells cinnamon and ripe peach next to him, then feels a hip brush his hard enough to make him fumble the can a little, cold condensation dripping down his wrist onto his scuffed work boot. He glances over, and his throat goes tight. It’s Elara Voss, the younger sister of a second baseman he scouted back in 2004, who he’d last seen when she was 17, yelling at an umpire from the bleachers after her brother got called out on a bad strike. She’s 44 now, he does the math fast, a streak of silver running through her auburn hair that’s pulled back in a messy braid, flour smudged on the knee of her denim overalls, and she’s grinning at him like she’s been waiting to run into him.
He tries to mumble a quick greeting and edge away, convinced he’s being a creep for even noticing how good she looks, for how his skin is still buzzing from where her hip bumped his. She beats him to it, saying she recognized his truck with the Cleveland Guardians sticker on the back window in the parking lot, and she’d been looking for him to say thank you— the contract he got her brother back in 04 paid for their mom’s cancer treatment, and let her go to culinary school, and she’d never gotten a chance to properly tell him how much that meant. He freezes, then shrugs, says he just did his job, but he doesn’t walk away.
They stand there for 45 minutes, watching the derby, the kid he’s tracking hits three home runs that land in the cornfield past the left field fence, and Marlon barely notices. He’s too focused on how she laughs loud when a 60-year-old farmer hits a dribbler straight into the dirt, how she tucks a stray strand of hair behind her ear when she’s listening to him grumble about how modern players skip bunt practice like it’s a punishment, how her hand brushes his when she points out a kid in the stands wearing a Guardians hat, the callus on her index finger rough against his knuckle from years of kneading pie crust. She runs the fair’s pie contest every year, she tells him, and she’s got a peach pie in the tent that just won first place, if he wants a slice. He says yes before he can think better of it.
A sudden thunderstorm hits when they’re halfway to the pie tent, fat cold raindrops splattering against the dusty fairground, turning the dirt under their feet to mud in 30 seconds. They run for the small awning over the pie tent entrance, pressed shoulder to shoulder under the tiny overhang, rain dripping off the brim of Marlon’s faded scouting cap onto Elara’s shoulder, their legs brushing through their soaked jeans. She looks up at him, her cheeks pink from running, and says she’s been asking the waitress at the diner he eats at every Sunday about him for months, but he always leaves before she can get there. He admits he’s avoided even looking her way for years, because he felt like a pervert for noticing how pretty she was when she was still a teenager, for thinking about her on long drives between games. She snorts, says she had a crush on him back then too, used to drag her mom to every one of her brother’s games just to watch him pace the dugout, chewing tobacco and yelling instructions at the players.
She leans in then, kissing him slow, and she tastes like peach and the iced coffee she’d been sipping earlier, her hand coming up to rest on the side of his neck, her thumb brushing the stubble on his jaw. He kisses her back, his hand resting light on her waist, ignoring the sound of kids yelling in the rain and the fair announcer yelling over the PA system that the derby is delayed 30 minutes.
The rain lets up 10 minutes later, the sun breaking through the clouds, painting a faint rainbow over the cornfield. He doesn’t even bother to walk over to the dugout to talk to the pitcher he’d come to see. He can call the kid tomorrow. He offers to drive her back to her house, says he can help her carry the leftover pies to her car first. She says yes, tucking her hand into his, her palm warm even through their soaked sleeves. He opens the truck door for her, his palm lingering on the small of her back as she steps up into the cab, and for the first time in almost a decade, he doesn’t feel the urge to rush off to the next game.
