Russell “Rust” Kouri, 51, has scouted Midwest Legion and high school baseball for 17 years, and he’s got one non-negotiable rule: never fraternize with player family outside of official, on-the-record interviews. It’s a rule that kept him out of trouble after his ex-wife left him for a small-town football coach 8 years prior, a rule that let him sink into the quiet, uncomplicated rhythm of 30,000 miles a year on gravel backroads, gas station chorizo burritos, and lukewarm draft beer at hole-in-the-wall bars after games. His biggest flaw is he’s convinced any deviation from his rigid routine will blow up the steady, if boring, life he’s cobbled together to avoid getting hurt again.
July humidity sticks to the back of his neck like glue as he sits at the only bar in Clear Lake, Iowa, typing up notes on the 19-year-old shortstop he’d watched hit two line-drive doubles earlier that night. The screen door slaps shut behind someone, and he smells lavender laundry soap and fresh-cut corn before he looks up. She’s the shortstop’s mom, he recognizes her immediately—she’d screamed so loud when her boy made that diving catch in the seventh inning half the stands turned to stare. She’s in frayed cutoff denim shorts, scuffed steel-toe work boots, and a faded 2019 Hawkeyes football tee, a red bandana holding back strands of sun-bleached blonde hair that escaped her ponytail mid-game.
She sits two stools down, orders a peach iced tea with extra ice, and when she reaches across the bar for the bowl of salted peanuts, her forearm brushes his. Her skin is calloused, dusted with a faint layer of farm dirt, and she mumbles an apology, hazel eyes crinkling at the corners when she spots the league’s scouting logo embossed on his notebook peeking out of his unbuttoned flannel shirt pocket. “You the guy who’s been scribbling down every time Jax missed a cutoff all night?” she teases, sliding her stool an inch closer, her knee brushing his under the bar before she pulls back like she didn’t mean to do it.
Rust freezes for half a second. He knows the rule. He’s never broken it, not even when a dozen overeager baseball moms slid him their numbers after games over the years. But her laugh is warm, roughened by decades of yelling over tractors and outfield bleachers, and he finds himself leaning in anyway, telling her he was actually writing down that Jax has the best fielding instincts he’s seen from a kid in western Iowa all season. He doesn’t mention the formal interview he’s supposed to schedule with her and Jax next week, doesn’t mention the thick rulebook tucked in the glove compartment of his work truck. The jukebox in the corner plays old Johnny Cash deep cuts, the fryer in the back gurgles, and every time she reaches for her glass, her arm brushes his again, sending a jolt up his spine he hasn’t felt in close to a decade.
He argues with himself for 45 minutes, half of him disgusted that he’s even considering entertaining this, knowing a single rumor could get him put on probation, or worse, fired from the only job he’s ever loved. The other half of him is hungry, starved for conversation that doesn’t revolve around exit velocities or signing bonus caps, starved for the way she’s looking at him like she sees more than a guy in a worn baseball cap and mud-caked work boots. When she asks if he wants to drive out to her family’s pasture down the road to watch the fireflies, says Jax is staying with his grandma for the night and no one will see them, he hesitates for exactly three seconds.
He nods.
They walk out to her beat-up 2008 Ford F150, and she opens the passenger door for him, her calloused hand brushing his when he climbs up. The drive is five minutes long, no radio, just the sound of crickets through the open windows and the low hum of the truck’s aging engine. She parks at the edge of the pasture, where the tall corn meets knee-high bluestem grass, and hundreds of fireflies blink bright gold all across the field, lighting up the dark like tiny floating stars.
She leans over the center console, and kisses him slow, her hand resting on the side of his face, her thumb brushing the scar on his jaw he got from a line drive accident in college. She tastes like peach iced tea and spearmint gum, and he rests his hand on her knee, the rough denim warm under his palm, not thinking about the rulebook, not thinking about the report he has to send to headquarters first thing in the morning, not thinking about anything except the way the firelight dances across her cheeks. He doesn’t even flinch when a firefly slips in through the open window, landing light as a feather on the back of her hand as she pulls him closer.
