5. Catalina
Chapter five
Catalina
Sebastian comes out the Saturday before O’Sullivan’s due to arrive, which tells me he thinks this is a project he can finish before his afternoon opens up.
He parks the German car at an angle that keeps both tires off the gravel he doesn’t like, gets out in weekend clothes that cost more than my work ones, and takes a slow look at the place like he’s appraising it.
He does that every time. Three years and he’s never looked at the ranch and seen the ranch.
He looks at it and sees square footage and a tax structure and a story he can tell at dinner about the woman he’s seeing who runs a whole spread out in the county, can you believe it?
“You look good,” he says, kissing my cheek. “Rugged. It suits you.”
“You want coffee, or you want to say the thing you drove out here to say?”
He laughs as if I’m charming. “Straight to it. I’ve always liked that.” He has never liked that. He likes it in the story. In the room it makes him tighten around the eyes, the way it does now.
We walk. He keeps to the packed dirt, and I let him, and Vicente lifts two fingers off a fence rail in a way that means I’ve got eyes on this if you need me, and I lift one back that means I’ve got it, and Sebastian misses the entire exchange because he’s already talking.
“I’ve been thinking about the O’Sullivan placement.”
“I told you I wasn’t discussing it.”
“Hear me out. That’s all. Just hear me out.
” He stops by the near paddock and turns to face me, and this is the pose, the one from the firm’s website, the one that’s supposed to make you feel handled in a good way.
“You’ve got a national name in court-ordered placement on your property.
Do you understand what that is? One controlled story, the right reporter, a photographer we approve, a piece about redemption and second chances and the work you do out here, and the program has a waiting list for the next ten years. Donors. Real ones. You stop scraping.”
And the worst part is he’d know how to do it, because he knows what this place runs on down to the dollar.
He’s quoted my county contract at his own dinner parties like it’s a stock he’s thinking about shorting.
That’s the one thing Sebastian reads better than anyone: not people, never people, but money, and mine most of all.
“I don’t scrape.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I know what you mean.” That’s the problem. I always know exactly what he means. “You mean you’d like to turn a man’s worst week into content, and you’d like to use my program to do it, and you’ve decided that’s a favor to me.”
“I’d like to see what you’ve built get the recognition it deserves. The recognition you deserve.”
“It doesn’t need recognition. It needs to work. Those aren’t the same thing and that you’ve never understood the difference is…”
I stop.
Because I hear where the sentence is going, and I realize I’ve been walking toward it for longer than this conversation.
For months. Maybe for the whole three years, the way you walk toward a gate you can see from across the field, slow, certain, in no particular hurry, right until you’re standing at it.
“… is the whole thing,” I finish, quieter. “That’s the whole thing, Sebastian.”
He knows the register change. He didn’t get where he is by missing register changes.
“What are we talking about right now?” he says carefully.
“We’re talking about the fact that you drove out here to sell my life’s work as a press release, and you genuinely thought I’d be grateful.” I’m not angry. What I’ll think about later is that I stood in front of the paddock and ended three years and my voice never left level.
“I’ve made harder calls than this before breakfast. This one took me longer than it should have.”
“Catalina.”
“It’s Catt.” And there it is, the thing I’ve been keeping in my boot for three years, out now, small and clean.
“It was always Catt. I told you the first week. Three years, and not once. Not in front of your partners, not in bed, not once. And I kept a little count of it without deciding to, and I think the count is the reason I already knew.”
He does the thing where he recalculates. I watch him run it. The angles, the salvage, whether there’s a version of the next sentence that turns this around, and it’s almost impressive, the speed of it, and it’s exactly why I’m done.
“You’re ending this,” he says, “over a name.”
“No. I’m ending it over three years of you not hearing a small thing I asked for plainly. The name’s just how I kept score.”
He gets as far as the car before he decides he will not eat this quietly.
“You know what your problem is.” He says it over the roof of the German car, not a question; the polish gone now that there’s nothing left to sell.
“You’ve spent so long out here in the dirt you’ve forgotten what you are.
I was the best thing that was ever going to walk onto this ranch, Catalina.
Men like me don’t come out to the county twice.
” He opens the door. “You’ll be thirty-five and alone out here with your horses and your criminals, and you’ll remember I told you so. ”
“Catt,” I say.
He’s already dropping into the seat.
“The name,” I say, louder, so it catches him before the door shuts.
“It’s Catt. You’re still getting it wrong on your way out.”
He reverses off the gravel he doesn’t like, careful even now, and I stand in the yard until the dust settles.
Then I stand there a while longer, because the thing nobody tells you about ending something you’re sure about is that being sure doesn’t make it light.
Three years. Not a bad man, exactly. Just a man who was never the man I needed him to be, and I knew it, and I stayed, and there’s a grief in the wasted time that has nothing to do with missing him.
I don’t miss him. I miss the years I spent being almost-satisfied when I could have been alone, which is cleaner.
My mother is going to be a problem.
Elena adored him from the first dinner. The résumé, the manners, the way he pulls out a chair.
To her he’s the settled kind of man, the kind who proves a Delgado daughter landed where a Delgado daughter’s supposed to land.
She sees the chair he pulls out. She has never seen that he pulls it out for the version of me that photographs well, and puts it back the second the picture’s taken.
She’ll say I’m too particular. She’ll say I find the flaw in every good thing because I’m looking for it. She’ll say thirty-two, Catalina, as if it’s a fence I’m about to lean on until it gives.
I’ll have that conversation when it comes. Not today.
Today I’ve got a stray to move and a post to reset and a stranger showing up Friday to start his six months, and the work has the decency to tell me plainly what it needs, which is more than I can say for anyone who’s ever pulled out a chair.
I whistle for Vicente and go back to the fence.