Rafe Marquez, 53, has spent the last 18 years crisscrossing Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky as a minor league baseball scout, logging 40,000 miles a year in his dented 2017 F150, eating most meals out of a cooler, and sleeping in cheap motel rooms where the TV only gets three channels. His biggest flaw, one he’ll laugh off if pressed but won’t deny, is that he holds grudges like an infielder clutches a game-winning fly ball: tight, unrelenting, no intention of letting go. For 12 years, that grudge has kept him away from the town’s annual summer street fair, the same event where his ex-wife announced she was leaving him for the cocky real estate developer who just got elected mayor last fall. This year, his little sister threatened to hide all his vintage scouting scorecards if he didn’t show up to man the youth baseball sign-up booth, so he caved.
The July air sticks to his skin like wet newspaper, thick with the smell of fried Oreos, cut fescue, and the diesel fumes from the tractor pull set up at the far end of the street. He’s halfway through handing a stack of flyers to a harried mom with two kids clinging to her legs when Lena Carter steps up to the booth, and he freezes. She’s the mayor’s wife, 15 years his junior, always in the background at town meetings, quiet, wearing the kind of modest dresses that look like they were picked out for her by the mayor’s campaign manager. Today she’s in a light blue sundress, no shoes, toenails painted pale pink, a smudge of cotton candy on her left cheek.