Ray Jimenez, 53, has scouted high school and college baseball prospects across the Carolinas for a low-level minor league affiliate for 22 years. He’s got a scar across his left eyebrow from a foul ball that got past the dugout screen last spring, a habit of twisting the frayed brim of his faded team cap when he’s nervous, and a hard rule he hasn’t broken in seven years: no dating, no small talk that leads to dating, no showing up to town events long enough for the local matchmakers to corner him. The only reason he’s at the annual August Rotary barbecue in his small mountain town outside Asheville is his next-door neighbor promised him a whole frozen pecan pie if he stayed for at least an hour.
The air is thick enough to drink, sweet with charcoal smoke and vinegar-based pulled pork sauce, the thwack of cornhole bags mixing with the high scream of kids chasing each other with water guns. He’s leaning against the splintered edge of a picnic table nursing a lukewarm Bud Light when she bumps into him, her elbow catching the soft skin of his forearm hard enough to make him jostle his beer. Her paper plate heaped with pulled pork and coleslaw tilts, but she catches it before anything spills, laughing so hard the corners of her hazel eyes crinkle. She’s the new county public health director, he remembers, Lila, everyone’s been gossiping about her for months—moved here from Raleigh after a very public divorce from a state senator, half the town thinks she’s a troublemaker, the other half thinks she’s too good for this hick corner of the mountains.
“Sorry,” she says, wiping a stray fleck of sauce off the hem of her linen button-down, and he smells coconut sunscreen and spearmint gum, sharp and bright against the smoky barbecue smell. “I swear I still haven’t figured out how to walk through crowds without taking out half the room.” He nods, already mentally drafting an excuse to leave, until he sees the calluses on the tips of her fingers, rough and discolored, and he asks before he can stop himself if she plays an instrument. She lights up, says she plays lead guitar in a 90s country cover band that plays the dive bar downtown every other Saturday, and for 20 minutes they talk about shitty dive bar acoustics and the time he saw Merle Haggard play a tiny show in Charlotte in 1998, and he forgets to scan the crowd for the gossiping retirees that usually make him bolt.
The first clap of thunder hits so loud the picnic tables rattle, and then the rain opens up, cold and heavy, so fast everyone yells and scrambles for cover under the tin pavilion awning. They get pressed shoulder to shoulder in the crush of people, her left side pressed tight to his chest, her damp hair sticking to the collar of his faded flannel shirt. A drop of rain rolls off the edge of the awning and hits her earlobe, sliding down her neck to the neckline of her shirt, and he has to look away for a second, his throat tight. He can hear her breath over the sound of the rain hammering the tin roof, feel the heat of her through both their shirts, and for a second he’s torn—he knows if he so much as smiles at her too long, the whole town will be talking about it by sunrise, that he’ll have to answer questions from everyone at the grocery store and the gas station for months, that he’s risking the quiet, uncomplicated life he’s spent seven years building.
But then she leans up, her mouth close enough to his ear that he can feel her breath warm against his skin, and says “I swear if one more little old lady asks me if I’m here alone I’m gonna climb over this awning and run for it.” He laughs before he can overthink it, leans down so he’s close enough that only she can hear him, and says “My place is five minutes away. Got a covered porch, better beer than this swill, and that old Merle Haggard record I was talking about. No old ladies, no gossip, just rain and beer.”
She grins, lacing her fingers through his, and he doesn’t even glance at the crowd to see who’s watching as they slip out the back of the pavilion, their boots squelching in the already muddy grass. She squeezes his hand when she almost slips on a patch of wet clover, and he can feel the calluses on her fingertips catching on the calluses on his, worn rough from 22 years of holding clipboards and hauling coolers to bleachers. He unlocks the door to his beat-up 2012 Ford F-150, holds it open for her, and she climbs in, shaking rain off her hair onto his faded seat covers, and he doesn’t even mind.
