CHAPTER 19
Waiting for Word
The Cross Ranch
The weeks following Marquez's departure passed in a state of uneasy suspension, Callie's days filled with the ordinary business of the household — Sam's lessons, Lily's endless questions, the practical rhythms of ranch life she had, by now, largely mastered — while her evenings carried an undercurrent of anxious waiting, watching the road for whatever response her father might yet see fit to send in reply to Marquez's report.
“You needn't fret so,” Nathaniel told her, one evening on the porch, noting her distracted attention to the road rather than the conversation at hand. “Whatever comes, we'll face it together, same as we agreed.”
“I know. I simply cannot help wondering what form my father's response will take. He is not a man accustomed to accepting defeat gracefully, and I fear this silence may simply mean he's marshaling some further effort rather than accepting my decision as final.”
“Then we shall meet whatever further effort he marshals, same as we met Marquez himself. You're not facing this alone, Callie, however long the waiting proves.”
The children, for their part, had grown considerably attached to Callie over these several months, their earlier wariness long since replaced by a genuine, unguarded affection that manifested itself in small, daily ways — Lily's insistence on sitting beside Callie at every meal, Sam's habit of seeking her out to share the day's small triumphs and difficulties, both children having settled into a trust that Callie recognized, with quiet gratitude, as considerably more valuable than any wage the position paid.
“You won't let that man make you leave, will you?” Lily asked one evening, with the particular directness she had never fully abandoned despite her growing trust, climbing into Callie's lap with the unselfconscious affection of a child who had decided, some months back, that this particular grown-up was worth the risk of loving.
“I don't intend to leave, Lily, not if I can help it. But I won't pretend I can make you any absolute promises, sweetheart. I can only promise that I'll fight to stay, with everything I've got, because I want to stay every bit as much as you want me to.”
“That's what Papa said too, about Mama, near the end. That he'd fight to keep her, but sometimes fighting isn't enough.”
Callie felt her heart ache at the child's blunt, hard-won wisdom, understanding that Lily had learned, at far too young an age, the genuine limits of even the fiercest love and determination against certain kinds of loss.
“You're right, Lily. Sometimes fighting isn't enough, and that's a hard, true thing to have learned so young.
But this particular fight, against my father's stubbornness, isn't the same kind of fight as illness.
This is a fight I have real power to win, provided I stay determined and don't let fear talk me into running before the fight's properly finished.”
“I'll help you fight it, then,” Lily said, with the fierce, uncomplicated loyalty of a five-year-old who has decided a matter to her own satisfaction, “even if I don't rightly know how a little girl's supposed to fight a grown man clear in New Mexico.”
“You can help by being exactly who you are, Lily — brave, and honest, and willing to love people even when loving feels risky. That's rather more powerful help than you might realize.”
The reply from Santa Fe, when it finally arrived some three weeks after Marquez's departure, proved considerably shorter and considerably less combative than Callie had feared, though its brevity carried its own particular weight of unresolved tension.
Callista, her father had written, in a hand she recognized as carrying rather more restraint than his usual imperious certainty, Marquez has reported your circumstances and your stated wishes.
I do not accept your decision as wise, nor do I withdraw my considerable disappointment in the manner of your departure, which has caused this family no small embarrassment before the Alvarado family and our wider social circle.
However, I am given to understand, through Marquez's own assessment, that you have found genuine stability and evident happiness in your present circumstances, and I am not so hard a man, whatever your recent opinion of me, as to compel a daughter's return against her clearly stated wishes through means that would only compound this family's public embarrassment further.
I withdraw my support for the Alvarado arrangement, Don Rafael having in any case grown considerably less patient with the delay than his initial interest suggested he would prove, and have informed him accordingly.
I do not know that I can properly forgive the manner of your leaving, Callista, but I find, examining my own conscience on the matter, that I am not entirely without fault in having driven you to such measures in the first place.
Write to me, if you are so inclined, and tell me something of this territory that has apparently claimed your loyalty so thoroughly. Your father, Esteban Reyes.
Callie read this letter with tears she did not attempt to suppress, understanding it, for all its careful restraint and lingering disapproval, as considerably more generous a concession than she had ever genuinely expected from her proud, unyielding father, and found herself, reading it over a second time in the privacy of her own room, feeling something in her chest ease that she had not fully realized, until this moment of release, how tightly she had been holding.
The weeks of waiting that had preceded this letter's arrival had proven, in their own particular way, as instructive as the confrontation with Marquez itself, teaching Callie something about patience she had not previously understood herself capable of learning.
She had grown accustomed, over three-and-twenty years of her father's management, to crisis resolving itself swiftly, one way or another, according to his own decisive judgment.
This slower, more uncertain waiting, dependent on someone else's timeline rather than her own or her father's accustomed swiftness, had tested a different kind of endurance entirely, and she found, looking back on the weeks of anxious watching for the mail, that she had grown genuinely stronger for having weathered them.
Ruth, visiting shortly after the letter's arrival, listened to Callie's account of her father's careful concession with evident satisfaction.
“That's rather more than I expected too, if I'm honest, having heard something of Esteban Reyes's reputation for stubbornness even before you arrived.
I'd wager this whole ordeal has taught him something valuable as well, however painful the lesson proved.”
“I hope so, Ruth. I don't wish him genuine suffering, whatever our considerable disagreements. I only wished for the freedom to choose my own life, and I find, now that I've been granted that freedom, that I've rather less anger left over than I expected to still be carrying.”
“That's forgiveness finding its own proper season, dear, same as everything else worth having tends to require its own particular time to properly ripen.”
Callie shared the letter with Nathaniel that evening as well, watching his own evident relief at the news mirror her own.
“I confess I'd half expected this to end rather differently,” he admitted, “given everything you'd described of your father's considerable pride. This concession, however carefully worded, speaks well of him, whatever his earlier failings.”
“I think perhaps my flight taught him something he might never have otherwise learned — that his children are not simply pieces to be arranged according to his own convenience, but people with genuine wills of their own, deserving of consideration rather than mere management.
That's a hard lesson for a man like my father to learn, and I'm rather proud of him, in a strange way, for having learned it at all, however belatedly.”
“Then perhaps some good has come of this whole difficult ordeal beyond your own freedom, Callie. Perhaps your courage in fleeing has taught your whole family something valuable about the cost of managing rather than genuinely loving the people in their care.”
“I hadn't considered it in quite those terms, but I think you're right, Nathaniel.
Perhaps Miguel will benefit from this lesson too, when his own turn comes to face our father's particular brand of managed affection. I should like to think my flight accomplished something more than merely securing my own happiness, however selfishly I undertook it at the time.”
“I don't think seeking your own happiness was selfish in the slightest, Callie, whatever guilt your father's household taught you to associate with the pursuit of it.
A person seeking genuine happiness, rather than merely enduring an arrangement designed for someone else's convenience, generally does more good in the world than harm, however much the immediate disruption might have cost your family's pride.”
This reassurance, offered with evident sincerity, settled something in Callie's lingering guilt regarding the pain her departure had caused, and she found herself, retiring that evening, feeling lighter than she had in months, the whole considerable weight of her father's potential pursuit finally, properly lifted from her shoulders.
She wrote her own reply to her father that same week, choosing her words with considerable care after several discarded drafts, understanding that this particular letter would set the tone for whatever relationship might yet develop between them going forward.
Dear Papa, she wrote, I received your letter with more relief and gratitude than I know how to properly express.
I do not ask your full forgiveness for the manner of my leaving, understanding that it caused you genuine embarrassment and pain, but I hope you might come to understand, in time, that I could not have remained and been the daughter you deserved, resentful and diminished as I would have become under an arrangement that offered me no genuine voice in my own future.
I have found here, in this rough but genuinely kind territory, a happiness I did not know to hope for, and I would be glad, whenever you feel ready, to share more of it with you, in whatever way our continued correspondence allows.
The reply that eventually came, some weeks later, carried a warmth that surprised her considerably, her father describing, in halting but genuine terms, his own reflection on the matter and his gradual recognition that his considerable pride had perhaps blinded him to his daughter's genuine wellbeing in his eagerness to secure an advantageous family alliance.
It was not a complete reconciliation, that exchange of letters, but it represented a genuine beginning, and Callie found herself, reading his careful words, cautiously hopeful that whatever distance remained between them might yet, given sufficient patience, prove bridgeable.