Manny Rios, 51, has spent the last eight years living out of a dented silver Ford F-150 and crisscrossing Ohio and Indiana as a minor league baseball scout, chasing the rare 17-year-old prospect who can throw 90-plus mph without losing control of his curveball or his temper. His biggest flaw, if you ask his older sister who calls him every Sunday to nag him about “meeting someone nice”, is that he’s built a brick wall around every part of himself that doesn’t relate to pitch speeds and fielding percentages. He lost his wife to ovarian cancer in 2015, and he’s told himself every day since that he doesn’t have the bandwidth for anything more serious than a post-scout beer and a microwave burrito when he gets home to his empty rental in Columbus.
It’s mid-July, the kind of sticky Ohio heat that seeps through your shirt before you’ve walked ten steps from your car, and he’s camped out at his usual scuffed vinyl stool at Wally’s, the dive bar he stops at every Tuesday after scouting the high school showcase in Lima. The linoleum under his boots is sticky with spilled beer and melted slushie, the bar’s busier than usual, a spillover from the plumbers’ union cookout down the street, so when the woman slides onto the only open stool next to him, her frayed denim jacket brushing the hair on his forearm as she sets a rocks glass of bourbon down on the sticky Formica bar top, he doesn’t even glance up at first. He’s hunched over his beat-up 2018 MacBook, scribbling notes in the margin of a crumpled scouting sheet about a shortstop who can turn a double play faster than any kid he’s seen in three years, but who freezes up every time a coach yells at him for dropping a pop fly.
“Garza? You spelt that wrong,” a low, rough voice says next to him. He looks up, and she’s leaning in just close enough that he can smell coconut sunscreen and burnt sugar on her, her dark hair pulled back in a loose braid, a smudge of blue ink on her left cheek. She’s maybe ten years younger than him, wearing scuffed white New Balances and faded navy scrub pants under that denim jacket, and her bare knee brushes his under the bar when she shifts to grab a crumpled paper napkin. She doesn’t yank it away right away, just holds that light, warm contact for two full beats, her dark eyes crinkling at the corners like she knows exactly what she’s doing.
Manny’s first instinct is to shut down, mumble a thanks, turn back to his laptop like she doesn’t exist. That’s what he always does when someone gets too close, when he feels that little spark of curiosity he’s spent years stomping out before it can catch fire. But she points at the scouting sheet, taps the misspelled name with a chipped navy blue nail, and says she dated a kid with that same last name when she was playing fastpitch at the University of Kentucky, and he spelt it with a z, not an s. He snorts before he can stop himself, crosses out the s, writes a messy z next to it, and says he’s never met anyone who could spot a misspelled prospect name faster than his micromanaging boss back in Cleveland.
She says her name is Lila, she’s a travel nurse, in town for a 12-week contract at the local Lima hospital, moved into an apartment down the street two days ago and came to the bar to avoid a mandatory fire drill that the building manager scheduled for 8 PM on a Tuesday, of all nights. She teases him for carrying a stack of scouting sheets around like they’re top-secret government files, asks him if any of these kids are actually gonna make it to the big leagues, and he finds himself talking for 20 minutes straight about the left-handed pitcher he saw last month who grows corn on his family’s 80-acre farm outside of Fort Wayne, who throws 94 mph but cries every time he strikes out a batter who’s a friend from his small-town high school.
He doesn’t even notice when the rowdy union crowd filters out, when the bartender turns down the Tom Petty that was blaring over the crackly speakers, until Lila leans in even closer, her hand resting light on his wrist where the old, faded scar from a college baseball sliding injury sits, her thumb brushing the raised skin for half a second like she’s been staring at it for ten minutes. “I know I’m only here for three months,” she says, and her voice is lower now, no teasing edge to it, the ice in her bourbon clinking soft as she shifts her weight on the stool, “No strings, no awkward ‘what are we’ talks, no pressure. I get what it looks like when someone’s been carrying around too much heavy stuff for too long.”
Manny feels that familiar war in his chest, the sharp twist of guilt for even thinking about sitting here flirting with someone who isn’t his wife, the dull burn of disgust he usually feels at the idea of letting anyone get close, tangled up with the warm, low hum of desire he hasn’t felt in almost a decade. He stares at her hand on his wrist, at the smudge of ink on her cheek, at the way she’s not pushing him, not waiting for a grand declaration, just looking at him like he’s a regular guy, not some widower who lives out of his truck and talks to 17-year-old ballplayers more than he talks to anyone his own age.
He closes his laptop, shoves the crumpled scouting sheets into the frayed navy duffel he keeps slung over the back of his stool, and signals the bartender to close out his tab. He tells her there’s a taco truck two blocks over that does al pastor with grilled pineapple, that he knows a quiet spot by the reservoir out past the high school where you can sit on the hood of his truck and watch the fireflies while you eat. She grins, slides off the stool, and when they walk out into the thick, humid July dark, her hand brushes his as they cross the potholed parking lot, her laugh carrying over the sound of crickets when he trips over a curb and almost drops his duffel in a puddle of melted slushie.
