Manny Ruiz, 52, minor league baseball scout, had spent the last eight years perfecting the art of vanishing. After his wife Elaina died of aggressive breast cancer two weeks before their 20th anniversary, he’d thrown himself into 300-day road stints, sleeping in cheap motel rooms, eating gas station burritos, and scribbling notes on teen pitchers’ fastball velocity until his eyes burned. His only flaw, if you asked his older sister Marisol, was that he’d convinced himself he didn’t deserve anything that didn’t involve a baseball diamond and a clipboard. She’d badgered him for three straight days to show up to the West Knoxville block party before he left for the fall instructional league circuit, and he’d caved only to get her to stop texting him passive aggressive memes about lonely old men with 12 cats.
He showed up in a faded 2019 Tennessee Volunteers cap, scuffed steel-toe boots, and jeans with a hole in the knee from kneeling in dugout dirt, clutching a lukewarm Pabst he’d grabbed from the cooler by the grill. He leaned against the thick trunk of the oak tree that split his and his next door neighbor’s yard, fully planning to sneak out in 20 minutes flat, when a woman carrying a ceramic tray stacked high with peach cobbler tripped over a coiled garden hose at his feet. He reacted on instinct, the same reflex that had let him catch line drives as a 19-year-old single A second baseman, and snagged her elbow before she face-planted into the grass. The tray tilted, and a dollop of warm, cinnamon-dusted cobbler dripped onto his bare forearm.
She laughed, bright and loud, over the twang of old Johnny Cash playing on the portable speaker by the picnic table. “Well that’s one way to introduce myself. I’m Clara, moved in six months ago while you were off… whatever you do that keeps you gone 11 months of the year.” She was 48, he guessed, with sun streaks in her auburn hair, smudges of indigo clay on the wrist of her linen button down, and calluses on the tips of her fingers where she’d wiped a smudge of cobbler off his skin. He could smell jasmine shampoo and the earthy, dusty scent of kiln-fired clay on her, and when she leaned in a little closer to make sure he wasn’t burned, he found himself leaning too, so close he could count the faint freckles across her nose.
He told her he was a scout, spent most of his time driving between small towns in the southeast looking for kids who could throw 95 miles an hour without blowing out their elbow. She told him she was a potter, sold mugs and bowls at the farmers market every Saturday, and had been going to the minor league games in downtown Knoxville all summer because she liked the cheap hot dogs and the way the crowd sounded when a kid hit his first home run. They talked for an hour, then two, the crowd thinning around them as kids got dragged home to bed and older neighbors wandered off to watch college football highlights. He kept fighting the voice in the back of his head that screamed he was betraying Elaina by even enjoying talking to another woman, that this was stupid, that he was leaving in three days anyway, that he’d only end up hurting both of them. But every time he tried to pull back, she’d ask another question, about the weirdest thing he’d ever seen at a baseball game, about the time he got hit in the jaw with a fastball that left the thin, silver scar he’d hated for 33 years, and he’d forget to be scared.
The sun dipped below the rooflines, and the string lights strung between the oak trees flickered on, gold and soft. Some teens down the street set off small, popping fireworks that fizzed pink and green across the darkening sky. Clara leaned in to brush a dry oak leaf off the shoulder of his t-shirt, her hand lingering for half a beat on his collarbone, and their eyes locked. He could hear crickets chirping in the grass, the distant roar of a car on the highway, the faint thud of his own heart beating faster than it had in almost a decade. The voice in his head went quiet, for the first time in years.
“You wanna come back to my place?” he said, before he could overthink it. “I got a bottle of good bourbon I picked up outside Lexington last month. Back porch has the best view of the fireworks in the neighborhood.”
She didn’t even hesitate, just grinned and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “Lead the way, scout.”
They walked up his driveway side by side, their shoulders brushing every other step, and when he unlocked the back door, she stepped inside first, her bare arm brushing the doorframe. He flicked on the porch light, reached for the bourbon on the counter by the door, and for the first time in eight years, he didn’t feel the heavy weight of grief sitting on his chest when he looked forward to what came next.
