Manny Ruiz, 59, minor league scout for the Midwest League, had been leaning against a splintered oak picnic table at the Athens County Rib Cookoff for all of 12 minutes before he considered bailing. He’d driven six hours from Indianapolis the day prior, after his sister called to say their mom had tripped over the family beagle and fractured her hip, and he’d already fielded three nosy questions from former high school classmates about his 2001 divorce and where he’d been hiding all these years. His pulled pork sandwich oozed BBQ sauce onto his scuffed work boots, the cheap light beer in his plastic cup tasted like carbonated dish soap, and the air hummed with the kind of small-town gossip he’d spent two decades running from.
He was crumpling his empty sandwich wrapper to toss when a voice cut through the noise, warm and rough around the edges, two feet to his left. “Manny Ruiz. I’d know that slouch even if you had that ratty Tigers cap pulled down over your whole face.”
He looked up. Lena Marquez, his ex-wife’s younger cousin, was leaning against the next table over, holding a jar of wild blackberry honey in one hand, a half-eaten corn dog in the other. She’d had streaks of silver in her dark hair since she was 30, now they ran all the way to her shoulders, and the sleeves of her faded red flannel were rolled up to show forearms crisscrossed with tiny beekeeping scars. When she stepped closer to him, he smelled clover and lemonade and the faint, sweet stickiness of honey on her wrists.
His first thought was that he shouldn’t talk to her. Small town rules were unwritten but ironclad, even 22 years after he’d signed the divorce papers. His ex had moved to Florida 10 years prior, remarried a retired golf pro, but half the people at the cookoff had been at their wedding. He’d spent so long carrying guilt for leaving, for missing his daughter’s high school graduation because he was too ashamed to come back, that the idea of even being seen laughing with his ex’s cousin felt like a betrayal of the penance he’d forced himself to serve.
She didn’t give him time to backtrack. She reached across the space between them, tapped the radar gun clipped to his belt with one finger, her knuckle brushing the denim of his jeans. “Still chasing 19-year-olds who can throw 90 miles an hour? I heard you scouted that kid who got drafted by the Reds last year. Good for you.”
He blinked. He hadn’t told anyone in town about that. “You keep up with my career?”
“Some of us never bought the story that you were the bad guy in all that mess,” she said, leaning in so her shoulder brushed his bicep, her voice low enough that the group of retirees arguing about rib rub next to them couldn’t hear. Her breath smelled like cinnamon. “Your ex was cheating on you for six months before you left. Everyone knew it. No one had the guts to tell you.”
The confession knocked the wind out of him. He’d spent 22 years thinking he’d abandoned his family, that he’d been selfish for taking the scouting job and leaving town, and here she was, telling him everyone had known the truth and let him carry the blame anyway.
When the band struck up the opening chords of Free Fallin’, she grabbed his hand, her palm rough and warm against his, calluses from lifting hive boxes catching on the cracks in his own calluses from holding a radar gun 10 hours a day. “C’mon. Dance with me.”
He shook his head, half laughing. “I can’t dance. I never could.”
“Neither can I,” she said, already pulling him toward the crowd of people swaying by the stage. “Who cares?”
He didn’t resist. They stumbled through the first verse, him stepping on the toe of her work boot twice, her laughing so hard she had to rest her hand on his chest to steady herself. The fabric of her flannel was soft under his fingers when he rested his hand on her waist, and when she tipped her head back to laugh at him messing up the chorus, the last of the sun hit her face just right, and he forgot all about the people staring, forgot all about the old guilt, forgot all about the reason he’d stayed away for so long.
When the song ended, she leaned in, her lips brushing the shell of his ear, and said she had a pan of warm cornbread sitting on her kitchen counter, and that blackberry honey tasted a hell of a lot better on cornbread than it did in a jar at a cookoff.
He grabbed his jacket off the picnic table, his hand resting light on the small of her back as they walked past the food stalls, past the Ferris wheel spinning slow in the dark, past the group of his old classmates who waved at them like they didn’t care at all what he did, who never had. The gravel crunched under their boots, the distant sound of the band fading behind them, and when she unlocked the door to her beat-up silver pickup, he climbed into the passenger seat without a single second of hesitation.
