Manny Ruiz, 53, has spent most of the last 18 years bouncing between high school baseball fields and cheap motel rooms as a minor league scout for a Midwest MLB affiliate. His only consistent flaw is that he’s refused to so much as buy a woman a drink since his ex-wife left him for a pharmaceutical sales rep eight years prior, convinced any casual connection would make him a failure, even though the divorce was finalized before she finished packing her suitcase. He’s back in his tiny northern Ohio rental for a six week summer stretch, scouting local talent before he heads down to the fall leagues in Florida.
He’s leaning against a splintered picnic table in the county fair beer tent when he spots her, ice-cold draft in one hand, scouting notebook crumpled in the other, his boots still dusted with infield clay from the left-handed pitcher he watched throw seven shutout innings earlier that afternoon. Lena Marlow, 48, the county extension agent who’s judged the 4-H pie contest for as long as he’s lived in the area, is holding a blue ribbon tucked under one arm, wiping a smudge of peach filling off her wrist with a napkin. She catches him staring, holds eye contact for three full seconds longer than polite small-town custom allows, before she smiles and starts walking over.
He sits up straighter before he can stop himself. He’s spoken to Lena a dozen times over the years, usually at community fundraisers or the hardware store, but he’s never talked to her alone. Everyone in town knows her husband is a pipeline worker who’s been stationed in North Dakota for 18 months, everyone assumes they’re still happily married, that she’s just holding down the fort while he’s gone. She slides onto the bench next to him, close enough that her bare arm brushes his when she sets her own beer down, and the vanilla lotion she’s wearing mixes with the fried dough and cow manure drifting over from the livestock barn, sharp and sweet and impossible to ignore.
She asks about the lefty pitcher first, says the kid is her nephew, that she’s been driving him to practice since he was 12. Manny pulls out his scouting notebook, flips to the page with the kid’s stats, and leans in to point out his fastball velocity notes, their heads almost touching. Their knees knock under the table, and neither of them moves away. She laughs when he complains about the local high school coach who refuses to let his pitchers throw more than 70 pitches a game, her voice low and rough from yelling at pie contest judges earlier that day, and when she reaches across the table to grab a peanut from his bag, her hand brushes his, and she leaves it there for three slow beats before she pulls back.
Manny’s chest feels tight, half guilt, half sharp, unnameable want. He’s spent so long shutting that part of his brain off that he almost doesn’t recognize the feeling, the way his pulse picks up when she tucks a strand of sun-streaked blonde hair behind her ear, the way she keeps glancing at his mouth when he talks. He’s half convinced he’s reading the signals wrong, that she’s just being friendly, that the whole town will talk if anyone sees them sitting this close, until she leans in, her mouth almost touching his ear, and says her husband filed for divorce two weeks ago. No one knows yet, she says, not even her mom. I didn’t know who to tell first.
The roar of the nearby tractor pull fades for a second. He can feel her breath on his neck, can taste the peach pie and light beer on her when she leans in and kisses him, quick at first, like she’s testing the waters, then longer, when he cups her jaw with his calloused hand. No one is looking, everyone’s eyes fixed on the tractors tearing down the dirt track, the fair lights blinking pink and blue over their heads. She pulls away after a minute, grinning, and wipes a smudge of her peach lip gloss off his chin with her thumb.
They stay for another hour, talking about his upcoming trip to Florida, about the peaches she grows in her backyard, about how they’ve both been lonely for longer than either of them wants to admit. He walks her to her beat-up pickup truck when she says she has to go feed her dogs, and she squeezes his hand before she climbs in, tells him to meet her at the diner off the interstate at 8 a.m. the next day, that she’ll bring the rest of her prize-winning peach pie. He stands in the fair parking lot long after she drives away, holding the crumpled napkin she used to wipe the gloss off his face, listening to the Ferris wheel creak over the sound of the crowd.
