Manny Ruiz, 51, has spent the last 18 years as a minor league baseball scout, crisscrossing the Midwest in a 2018 Ford F-150 with a radar gun strapped to the passenger seat and a cooler of cheap beer in the back. He’s stubborn to a fault, a flaw his ex-wife cited no less than a dozen times in their divorce papers, and he’s spent the three years since that document was signed avoiding every person, place, and event that even tangentially overlapped with her side of the family. No holiday dinners, no mutual friends’ cookouts, no trips to the grocery store on the west side of Toledo where she still shops. This dive bar, 20 minutes outside the city limits, is his safe space: half-price wings on Tuesdays, jukebox stuck on 90s country and Johnny Cash, no one who knows his ex hangs around long enough to shoot him pitying looks.
He’s slouched on the sticky vinyl stool, boots propped on the rusted lower rail, a half-drunk Pabst sweating through its coaster in front of him, when the door chimes. He doesn’t look up, focused on dabbing hot sauce off the edge of his scouting report for a 19-year-old lefty from the Bronx who throws 98 mph and just got called up to the Tigers. The kid gave Manny a signed bat as a thank you two days prior, and Manny has been keeping it tucked in the back of his closet, too cheap to buy a mass-produced display and too proud to ask anyone to make him something nice.
The stool two seats over scrapes against the linoleum. He catches a whiff of cedar and vanilla, sharp and warm against the bar’s usual background stench of stale beer and fried pickles, and glances over. Lila Marquez. His ex’s younger cousin, the one who used to bring homemade empanadas to their backyard cookouts, who left for Portland right after he and his ex got married, who he hadn’t seen in person since he signed the divorce papers. She’s got a streak of silver cutting through her dark curly hair now, wears a frayed flannel shirt unbuttoned over a plain white tank, work boots caked in sawdust, silver hoop earrings that glint when she turns to look at him and grins like she knew he’d be here.
She shifts one stool closer, their knees brushing when she leans in to flag the bartender. The contact is light, denim on denim, but it sends a jolt up his spine he hasn’t felt since he was a teenager sneaking into his girlfriend’s bedroom after curfew. “Didn’t think you’d be caught dead in a place like this,” she says, her voice low and rough from years of smoking menthols she still swears she’s quit. His first instinct is to make an excuse, grab his duffel of scouting reports, and bolt. He promised himself he’d never engage with anyone from his ex’s side of the family again, too tired of the half-truths and the side-eyed judgment, too stubborn to admit he ever cared what any of them thought. But she’s already passing him a fresh paper napkin, her fingers brushing his wrist when she hands it over, her skin warm and calloused from manual work, same as his. “You’ve got wing sauce on your jaw,” she says, and her eyes linger on his mouth for a full beat before she looks away to sip her bourbon on the rocks.
They talk for two hours, the bar emptying out around them, the jukebox cycling through the same 20-song loop on repeat. She tells him she moved back to Ohio two months prior, opened a small woodworking shop on the edge of town, makes custom furniture and sports memorabilia displays. She tells him his ex cheated on him for six months before she left, that the whole family knew, no one had the guts to tell him because they were all scared of her temper. He sits with that for a minute, the white-hot anger he’s carried for three years softening a little, like someone finally lifted a corner of the heavy tarp he’s been hiding under. He tells her about the signed bat, about how he’s never had anything worth displaying before, about how he doesn’t want some mass-produced plastic thing from a big box store. “I’ll make you one,” she says, leaning in so close he can smell the bourbon on her breath, see the faint freckles across her nose he’d never noticed before. “My shop’s 10 minutes from here. You can come by tomorrow at 10, pick out whatever wood you want. No charge.”
The bartender yells last call, wiping down the bar with a raggedy towel that looks older than both of them. Lila stands, slings her canvas tool bag over her shoulder, leans in to hug him goodbye. It’s supposed to be a friendly hug, he thinks, until her hand rests on the back of his neck, her thumb brushing the short, graying hair at his nape, her lips brushing his ear when she whispers, “I’ve had a crush on you since I was 20, Manny. I just didn’t want to be the homewrecker everyone already called me back then. Now there’s nothing stopping us.” He freezes for half a second, every alarm bell in his head ringing about ex family drama, about small town gossip, about how stubborn he’s been about cutting all ties to his old life. Then he wraps his arm around her waist, pulls her a little closer, says “I’ll be there at 10. Don’t be late.”
She laughs, pulls back, winks at him before she walks out the door. He watches through the smudged bar window as she climbs into her beat up 2002 Ford Ranger, waves at him before she pulls out of the gravel parking lot. The neon “OPEN” sign paints pink and blue streaks across the empty bar top in front of him, the last of his beer is warm and flat, the peanut shells under his boots crunch when he shifts his weight. He pulls out his phone, deletes the 10 AM tee time he’d scheduled with a fellow scout he doesn’t even like, and tucks the signed bat’s scouting report into the inner pocket of his jacket. He leans back against the bar, smiles, and for the first time in three years, he doesn’t feel guilty for looking forward to tomorrow.
