Ronan O’Malley, 53, is a minor league baseball scout who’s logged 210,000 miles on his 2017 Ford F-150 in the last six years, crisscrossing the Midwest to scout high school and DIII pitchers most big league teams write off as too small, too slow, or too wild to sign. His biggest flaw is that he’s built his entire life around avoiding permanence; his ex-wife left him eight years ago for a lawyer who slept in the same bed four nights a week, and Ronan has told himself ever since that casual, unplanned connections are nothing but a headache waiting to happen. He wears the same faded 1998 St. Louis Cardinals cap every day, carries a beat-up leather binder full of velocity readings and scribbled scouting notes, and only ever orders a draft Pabst and a well-done bacon burger when he stops at Mabel’s, the dive bar off the main drag in tiny Mount Vernon, Illinois, every April.
He’s been stopping there for five years, and he’s never spoken to the woman behind the bar beyond his order and a mumbled thank you. She’s got a faint scar slicing across her left knuckle, wears a flannel tied around her waist over a faded Tom Petty tee most nights, and always slides an extra side of fries onto his plate without charging him. The rain is lashing the tin roof of the bar so hard he can barely hear the Johnny Cash track playing on the beat-up jukebox when he walks in on this particular Tuesday, the parking lot half-flooded, his boots squelching when he crosses the threshold. There’s no one else in the bar, not even the regular group of retired farmers who usually camp out in the back booth.
He takes his usual spot at the far end of the bar, drops his binder on the sticky Formica top, and orders his usual. She nods, pulls the tap, and slides the cold glass across the bar, their fingers brushing for half a second when he grabs it. The contact makes him jolt a little, the cold of the glass mixing with the warmth of her skin, and he looks up to find her holding his gaze, a tiny smirk playing at the corner of her mouth. “Scout any good pitchers this trip?” she asks, leaning her hip against the bar, close enough that he can smell the lemon Pledge she uses to wipe down the counters and the dark roast coffee she’s sipping out of a chipped ceramic mug.
He freezes for a second, surprised she even knows what he does. He’s never told her. He admits he scouted a lefty from the local high school that afternoon who throws 92 miles an hour but can’t throw a strike to save his life, and she laughs, a low, rough sound that makes the back of his neck warm. She sits down on the stool across from him, their knees brushing under the bar when she leans forward to grab the napkin he dropped off the floor. She tells him she’s watched him come in every spring for five years, always sits in the same spot, never talks to anyone, always leaves a 30% tip even when the bar is slammed and he waits 20 minutes for his beer. He’s so used to keeping people at arm’s length that for a second he doesn’t know what to say, the part of him that’s spent years insisting being alone is easier warring with the part of him that hasn’t felt this seen since his marriage fell apart.
The power cuts out then, the whole bar going dark except for the faint glow of the neon Coors sign in the window that runs on a backup generator. She huffs a laugh, stands up, and grabs a box of tea lights from under the bar, coming around to sit next to him instead of behind it this time, their shoulders pressed together, the warmth of her arm seeping through the thin flannel of her shirt, the faint scent of lavender from her shampoo mixing with the lemon Pledge and beer smell of the bar, as she lights each small candle and lines them up along the bar top. The warm golden glow hits her face, and he notices the faint freckles across her nose he never saw under the harsh overhead lights before. She tells him the scar on her knuckle is from last winter, when she tried to fix a broken beer tap by herself and it exploded, spraying beer all over a regular and slicing her hand open on the metal fitting. He tells her about the time he scouted a pitcher in Iowa who threw a fastball that hit a bird mid-flight, and she snorts, her arm bumping his when she leans forward to grab her coffee mug.
For 20 minutes, they sit there talking while the rain lashes the windows, the jukebox dead, the only sounds the crackle of the tea lights and the rumble of thunder off in the distance. He hasn’t talked this much to anyone who isn’t a high school coach or a front office colleague in years, and he’s surprised at how easy it is, how he doesn’t feel the urge to cut the conversation short and leave like he usually does. The power kicks back on suddenly, the overhead lights blaring, and they both blink, like they’re coming out of a trance.
He doesn’t overthink it. He tears off the corner of a scouting report from his binder, scribbles his cell number on it, and slides it across the bar to her, underlining it twice. He asks if she wants to get breakfast at the diner down the street the next morning before he drives out to his next scouting stop, and she nods, grinning, grabbing a napkin and scribbling her own number on it before handing it to him. He finishes his beer, pays his tab, and walks out to his truck an hour later, the rain having slowed to a fine mist, the air smelling like wet grass and diesel. He tucks the napkin with her number into the inner pocket of his scouting binder, right next to the page with the lefty pitcher’s stats.
