Moe Sorrentino, 53, minor league baseball scout for the Pittsburgh Pirates low-A affiliate, leans his shoulder against the chipped pine bar of the New Bethlehem beer garden, twisting the cap off a frosty Yuengling. He’s got 1200 miles on his F150 this week, a crumpled scouting report in his flannel pocket, and a 30-year grudge against the only girl who ever made him skip a summer scrimmage. He doesn’t know she’s 10 feet away, hauling a tray of soft pretzels and root beers for a table of teen ballplayers.
Her hip brushes his first, sharp enough that a dollop of mustard slops off the top pretzel onto his steel-toe work boot. He’s ready to snap until he looks down, meets her eyes, and the snark dies in his throat. Carla Marlow. Her dark hair is streaked with silver now, pulled back in a messy braid, her jeans caked with mud at the cuffs, and he’d know that half-smirk, the one that tugs up the left side of her mouth, if he saw it in a crowd of 10,000. She freezes, too, the tray tipping for half a second before she rights it, her calloused fingers brushing his wrist when she leans down to wipe the mustard off his boot with a crumpled napkin.
“Moe,” she says, and her voice is a little rougher than he remembers, deeper, like she spends half her days yelling over barking dogs. He finds out 10 minutes later, when they’re huddled at a wobbly corner table out of the drizzle, that she does: she runs the local animal rescue, and she was at the game earlier because her 16-year-old foster son was the starting shortstop for the home team. He almost gets up and leaves when she says that, because the last time they spoke, she’d dumped him for the starting shortstop of their high school team, a cocky kid with a cheap haircut and a scholarship to NC State who blew out his rotator cuff before he even played a college game.
The grudge has lived in his chest for so long it feels like a second heartbeat, sharp and familiar, but then she laughs, loud and unapologetic, when he teases her about that old boyfriend, and admits she’d broken up with the guy three months in, after she caught him making out with a cheerleader in the back of his Camaro. “I was an idiot,” she says, and her knee brushes his under the table, warm through the denim of both their jeans, and he notices her nails are chipped, painted a pale blue, no fancy manicure like she wore to prom. She leans forward, elbows on the table, and he can smell lavender hand soap and fried dough on her shirt, and he can’t remember the last time a woman looked at him like he’s the only person in the room, not just a guy in a faded Pirates ballcap with a notebook full of pitch counts.
He fights the pull for an hour, telling himself he’s got a 6 a.m. drive to Charleston for another game, that she broke his heart when he was 17 and she’d do it again, that he’s got no business wanting anything with someone he hasn’t seen in three decades. But when they walk out to the parking lot, the drizzle turned to soft, steady rain, she stops under a flickering streetlight, her flannel shirt sticking to her shoulders, and says she’s thought about him every time she hears a baseball announcer on the radio, every time she passes a field with kids hitting pop flies into the outfield grass.
He doesn’t overthink it. He pulls her close, one hand on her hip, the other cupping the back of her neck, and kisses her. She tastes like root beer and cherry lip balm, her hands fisting in the front of his flannel, and the grudge he’s carried for 30 years melts like ice in a sun-warmed cooler. He doesn’t care that the group of teens from the game are whooping from the porch of the beer garden, that he’s probably got mustard still crusted on his boot, that he forgot to write down the shortstop’s 60-yard dash time earlier that night.
When they pull apart, she’s smiling that half-smirk again, wiping a drop of rain off his cheek with her thumb. She says she has to run home to check on her foster son and let the three rescue dogs out of their crates, but she’ll meet him at his motel off the interstate in 20 minutes, if he wants. She scribbles her cell number on the back of a crumpled dog adoption flyer, the kind with a photo of a scruffy beagle on the front, and shoves it in his palm.
He tucks the flyer in the front of his scouting notebook, right next to the empty page he’d reserved for that night’s prospect notes, and watches her walk down the sidewalk, her work boots splashing in the puddles, the streetlight gilding the silver streaks in her braid. He doesn’t even remember what the prospect’s fastball topped out at.
