Manny Ruiz is 52, a minor league baseball scout who’s logged 17 years driving the Gulf Coast backroads in a dented 2016 Ford F-150, his duffel stuffed with scout notebooks, sunflower seed shells, and a scuffed 1993 college championship ring he never takes off. His biggest flaw, the one his ex-wife cited repeatedly in their divorce papers eight years prior, is that he talks himself out of every good thing before it has a chance to stick. He avoids small town events on principle, mostly to skip the awkward small talk about why he’s still single, why he never moved up to the MLB scouting corps, why he still sleeps with a beat-up college baseball under his seat. But the Pensacola little league booster club’s annual fish fry was impossible to turn down; the left-handed high school pitcher he’s been tracking all month is manning the fryer, and Manny wanted to see how the kid handles pressure off the mound as well as on.
He’s leaning against a gnarled longleaf pine, a paper plate of fried mullet and hushpuppies in one hand and a cold IPA in the other, when she trips over the cooler cord at his feet. He catches her left arm before she faceplants into a stack of paper dessert plates, his calloused palm wrapping around the warm, sun-browned skin just above her work boot. She laughs, a bright, loud sound that cuts through the crackle of the portable speaker playing Alan Jackson, and steadies herself, her free hand brushing his chest for half a second before she pulls back. He recognizes her immediately: Lila, the part-time county park ranger who’s been patrolling the fields all week while he’s been scouting, her truck emblazoned with the county park service logo, her uniform shirt always half unbuttoned at the collar, a smudge of charcoal or pine sap on her jaw more often than not.
She’s 28, he knows, the sheriff’s only daughter, and every guy over 18 and under 40 in this town has been asking her out for the past two years, per the kid he’s scouting, who mentioned it offhand during a post-practice interview. Manny’s first thought, sharp and unforgiving, is that he doesn’t want to be that guy – the graying, divorced old scout hitting on the local sheriff’s daughter, the subject of every diner gossip session for the next six months. But then she leans in, close enough that he can smell coconut sunscreen and fried dough on her shirt, and says she’s been watching him scribble in his notebook all week, wondered if he was a writer or a cop before she heard the kid call him “scout” a few days prior.
He offers her the last hushpuppy off his plate, and their fingers brush when she takes it, a jolt that travels up his arm and settles low in his chest. She says she’s leaving for a permanent park service job in Denali in two weeks, that she’s already given her notice, that she doesn’t give a single shit what anyone in this town thinks about anything she does before she leaves. He can feel eyes on them, a few of the booster club parents glancing over from the picnic tables, and for a second he wants to step back, mumble an excuse, head back to his motel room alone like he always does. But then she tilts her head, hazel eyes flecked with gold glinting in the string lights strung between the pines, and asks if he wants to walk down to the public beach after the fry wraps up, says the bioluminescence is supposed to be crazy bright that night.
He says yes before he can talk himself out of it. They walk the half-mile boardwalk to the shore an hour later, the sand cool and soft under their work boots, the sound of the fish fry fading behind them, replaced by the low crash of the Gulf waves. She stops halfway down the empty stretch of beach, turns to him, and leans up to kiss him, her hands tangling in the graying hair at the nape of his neck. He doesn’t overthink it, doesn’t worry about the age gap, or the gossip, or the fact that she’s leaving in two weeks. He just kisses her back, the salt of the ocean and the sweet taste of the peach cobbler she ate for dessert on her lips, the wind tangling his shirt against his skin.
They spend the next three nights together, no grand promises, no endless texts about the future, just takeout fried shrimp on his motel room balcony, quiet drives down the coast to watch sunsets, long slow mornings where they don’t get out of bed until noon. The day she leaves, he’s parked by the ball field, watching the left-handed pitcher throw warmups, when he spots the small smooth river rock she left on his dashboard, painted to look like a baseball, a tiny hand-drawn Alaska flag on the back. He tucks it into the pocket of his scout notebook, picks up his pen, and jots down his first note about the pitcher’s curveball without overanalyzing a single word.
