Ronan O’Malley, 53, has spent the last decade scouting high school and DIII baseball players for the Cincinnati Reds farm system, logging 30,000 miles a year in his dented F-150 and sleeping in cheap motels more often than his cedar cabin outside Athens, Ohio. Since his wife left him for a comparative literature professor 8 years prior, he’s cultivated a deliberate, low-profile routine: black coffee on the porch at 6 a.m., no small talk at the general store, zero attendance at any town event that might land him as a punchline in diner booth gossip. The only reason he’s at The Rusty Bat’s annual chili cook-off on a humid September Saturday is he lost a bet with the bar’s owner, Jake, who’d bet the left-handed pitcher Ronan scouted the previous spring wouldn’t hit 92 mph on the radar gun by fall. Ronan was wrong, so he owed Jake three hours of judging chili entries, no complaining allowed.
He slumps in the scuffed vinyl booth at the back of the bar, picking at a plate of stale pretzels and sipping a lager that’s already gone warm, when the booth shifts under him and someone slides into the seat across from him. It’s Lila Marquez, the 32-year-old traveling ER nurse who moved into the run-down farm property two miles down the road from his cabin three months prior. He’s only spoken to her once, when her pickup slid into a ditch during a July thunderstorm and he pulled it out with his truck’s winch. He’d turned down her offer to buy him dinner that night, hightailing it out of the general store parking lot before the group of retirees loitering by the gas pumps could start whispering.
She’s wearing a faded Pearl Jam flannel rolled up to her elbows, ripped dark jeans, and work boots caked in mud from fixing the fence on her property that morning. Her dark hair is pulled back in a messy braid, a few strands stuck to her forehead from the bar’s stuffy heat, and she smells like cinnamon and citrus hand sanitizer when she leans forward to slide a paper sample cup of chili across the table. Her elbow brushes his when she sets it down, and she doesn’t pull away, holding his gaze steady even when the group of garden club ladies at the next table glance over and nudge each other.
“I entered my abuela’s chili recipe,” she says, smirking when he just stares at the cup. “The other judges are all friends of my late uncle, who still hate me for selling his old John Deere when I inherited the farm. I need a fair shake. You look like you don’t owe anybody around here anything.”
Ronan snorts, picking up the cup. The chili is thick, spicy, has a hint of cocoa that lingers on his tongue, and he tells her it’s the best thing he’s tasted all month. She laughs, and her knee knocks his under the table, warm through the worn denim of his jeans. He spends the next hour talking to her, forgetting to check his phone for scouting updates, forgetting to scan the room to see who’s watching them. She teases him for the hole in the brim of his faded Reds cap, for the stack of scouting reports peeking out of his jacket pocket, for avoiding her for three months like she had a contagious disease. He admits he’d been scared of the gossip, that the last time he was the talk of the town, it was because his wife had moved cross-country with a guy who wrote essays about 19th century poetry, and he’d hated every second of it.
The cook-off wraps up at 8, Lila takes second place, cackling when the retired judge who gave her third place scowls at her from the stage. By the time they walk out to the parking lot, a steady, cold rain is pouring down, soaking through the shoulders of Ronan’s flannel in seconds. He offers her a ride to her farm, since her truck is parked all the way at the far end of the lot, and she nods, tucking herself under his arm for half a second to avoid a puddle, her hip pressing against his.
The heat in his truck is stuck on high, so the windows fog up fast as he pulls out of the lot. He hands her the frayed wool blanket he keeps on the passenger seat for cold scouting trips, and her fingers brush his when she takes it, warm and calloused from fixing fence posts and hauling hay bales. He pulls to a stop at the end of her gravel driveway, and she doesn’t reach for the door handle right away, twisting the edge of the blanket between her fingers.
“I’ve got a bottle of 12-year bourbon on the counter,” she says, looking over at him, the streetlight at the end of the road gilding the edge of her hair. “And a peach pie I baked this morning. You can stop worrying about what everyone thinks for one night, right?”
Ronan hesitates for half a second, thinking about the diner waitresses nudging each other when he walks in, the little league parents making snide comments about him robbing the cradle, all the stupid, small-town noise he’s spent 8 years avoiding. Then he looks at her, grinning like she already knows his answer, rain dripping off the end of her braid onto the blanket, and he turns off the truck’s engine.
He tucks the blanket under his arm when he gets out, following her up the rickety porch steps, the rain drumming loud on the metal roof above them. She fumbles with her keys for a second, her back pressing against his chest when she leans in to get the key in the lock, and he can smell the cinnamon from her perfume mixing with the rain on her jacket. She pushes the door open, the warm smell of bourbon and peach pie drifting out onto the porch, and she looks back at him over her shoulder, eyebrow raised. He crosses the threshold, pulling the door shut behind him.
