Rico Marquez, 52, has spent the last 12 years as a minor league scout for the Cincinnati Reds, logging 40,000 miles a year in his beat-up F-150, eating most meals out of a cooler, and sleeping in motel rooms that smell like stale cigarette smoke and laundry detergent. His biggest flaw, one he’ll never admit out loud, is that he’s spent seven years punishing himself for his wife’s death—she’d been on her way to pick him up from the Atlanta airport when a drunk driver t-boned her sedan, and he’s refused so much as a coffee date with anyone since, convinced any hint of joy would be a betrayal. He’s in south Georgia this week, chasing a 17-year-old lefty who can throw 96 miles an hour with a curveball that drops off a table, and he’s posted up at the county fair where the kid is showing off for his friends at the speed pitch booth.
The air is thick with humidity, fried dough, and hay, and he’s halfway through a lukewarm beer when the smell of baked peaches and cinnamon cuts through it all. He glances over to the cobbler stand ten feet away, and the woman running it looks right back at him. She’s got sun streaks in her dark brown hair, a flour smudge on her left cheek, and her name tag says Lila. She’s wiping down the counter with a rag, and when she walks over to bring the lefty a cold lemonade, her elbow brushes Rico’s bicep by accident. Her skin is warm, sun-kissed, and she holds his eye contact for two full beats before she grins. “I know you,” she says, like it’s a secret. “You’re Rico, from my ex-husband’s old college baseball team. He had a photo of you two holding a keg on his fridge for ten years.”
Rico’s jaw tightens. Her ex is Jax Carter, the guy he stopped talking to 20 years back after Jax won a bet Rico swears he cheated on, the guy who’d been his best friend for four years before that. The guilt hits him first—he shouldn’t even be talking to Jax’s ex, shouldn’t be noticing how the string lights strung above her stand make the gold hoops in her ears glow, shouldn’t be thinking about how her laugh sounds like wind chimes. He buys a small cobbler just to be polite, pays with a 20 and tells her to keep the change, and he’s halfway back to his truck when she calls after him.
He turns around, and she’s leaning against the edge of her stand, arms crossed over her chest, the hem of her faded denim shirt riding up just enough to show a tiny sunflower tattoo on the curve of her hip. “You gonna stand there looking guilty all night, or you gonna stay and help me pack up? The fair closes in an hour, and my cousin dropped off a jug of peach moonshine that’s way too strong for me to drink alone.”
Rico freezes. Half of him is screaming to leave, to drive back to his motel, to stick to the routine he’s built that keeps him safe, that keeps him from feeling anything that might make him remember how good it used to be to have someone to come home to. The other half is drawn to her, to the way she doesn’t tip toe around the fact that she knows who he is, that she doesn’t look at him with that sad, pitying expression most people get when they find out his wife is gone. He can hear the distant whine of the ferris wheel, the crackle of the cotton candy machine, the sound of kids yelling as they run past with glow sticks. He nods.
He spends the next hour folding tables, stacking tubs of leftover peaches, carrying coolers to the back of her beat-up silver Tacoma. She teases him about the way he still wears the same ratty Reds cap he had in college, tells him Jax left her three years ago for a 26-year-old realtor who thinks a cut fastball is a type of haircut. He tells her about his wife, about the scouting trips, about how he still talks to her in the car when he’s driving down empty back roads. She doesn’t tell him he should move on, doesn’t give him some stupid speech about healing. She just nods, and hands him a warm fried peach pie, and when she drops a jar of ground cinnamon, they both bend down to pick it up at the same time, their heads bumping soft enough that they both laugh for a full minute. Her hand rests on his shoulder when they stand back up, and he can smell jasmine on her perfume, sweet and warm, and he realizes the guilt he’s been carrying for seven years doesn’t have to live in every empty space in his life.
The fairgrounds are almost empty by the time they lock up the stand. She tosses the last of the trash in a dumpster, and turns to him, the moon bright enough that he can see the freckles across her nose. “You wanna follow me back to my place? The porch swing out front is big enough for two, and the moonshine tastes better when you’re watching the fireflies.”
Rico doesn’t hesitate this time. He nods, and walks to his truck, and when he pulls out of the fairground parking lot, he follows her taillights down the dark two-lane road, the windows rolled down, the smell of pine and peach drifting through the cab. He turns off the radio, and for the first time in seven years, he doesn’t feel the need to fill the silence with anything. He pulls into her driveway ten minutes later, kills the engine, and before he can open his door, she’s walking over to his side, leaning down to tap on the window, a cold can of sweet tea held out in her outstretched hand. She holds it there for a beat, her fingers brushing his palm slow and deliberate when he grabs it from her.
