18. Catalina
Chapter eighteen
Catalina
Finn asks me on a Wednesday, in the tack room, while I’m pretending to check a girth I already checked, something I do now, invent reasons to be where he is, like a girl, like a woman with nothing to lose instead of one with everything.
“Come somewhere with me Saturday,” he says. “Off the ranch. A real night. Dinner. Out.”
“We can’t be seen.”
“Not here we can’t.” And he’s got a look I’ve only ever seen in photographs, the one that used to score goals.
“Two counties over, nobody knows a washed-up hockey player from a fence post, and nobody out there has heard the name Delgado in their lives. We’d be two people nobody’s watching. For one night.”
He found the one offer I didn’t know how to refuse: anonymity.
I run the whole no in my head. The exposure. The review I can feel coming the way you feel weather. A woman my age sneaking off to a dance hall like a teenager. It’s a good no. Airtight.
“Okay,” I say.
He drives because it’s his truck. The strange part is that I let him. I don’t navigate, correct, or reach for control. I sit beside him and watch county road turn into city lights.
The place is a dance hall older than either of our families, a hundred years of boots worn into the pine floor. Christmas lights nobody took down. A four-piece band with a steel guitar that could make you cry about a dog you never had. And not one soul in it who knows us.
That’s the part I wasn’t ready for. Nobody looks twice.
A waitress calls me hon and means nothing by it, doesn’t clock the ranch or the program or the county contract, sees a woman out with her fella and pours the coffee and goes.
Thirty-two years I’ve walked into every room already being read: somebody’s daughter, somebody’s director, the woman who runs the Delgado place. Here I’m nobody. Here I’m his.
We eat something fried and bad for us. He steals one of my fries; I take it back off his plate, and he looks delighted that I did.
Nobody at the ranch gets this petty, laughing version of me. I had almost forgotten she existed.
Then the band goes slow, and he stands and holds out his hand, and I say, “You can’t,” and he says, “I can now. You taught me,” and God help me, he can.
He learned it on my own kitchen floor and he’s been waiting for a real floor to use it on.
He leads, slow and sure, a half-beat behind the music the way I showed him, and then somewhere in the second song half a beat ahead of it, on his own, having me.
The man who couldn’t stand still is walking me across a hundred-year-old floor like he’s got all the time either of us will ever need, and I put my face in his neck where the whole room turns into his pulse, and I let myself be led, and I don’t read a single person in that building.
Not one. First time in my life, a room full of people, and I’m not counting any of them.
“Enséname una palabra,” he says into my hair. Teach me a word. He’s been collecting them off Vicente and off me for weeks, banking them, and now he’s asking for one on purpose.
I don’t give him the easy one. I give him “quédate.” Stay.
He tries it, rough, the accent all wrong, and it’s the best thing I’ve ever heard. “Quédate.”
“Close enough.”
“Quédate,” he says again, and this time it isn’t practice. This time he says it looking at me, and it isn’t about the dance floor.
Then he does something I don’t expect. He gives me one back, low and rough, in a language that isn’t English and isn’t Spanish, a few words of Irish off a grandmother who raised him on it before the game took him.
“Fan liom.” I don’t have to ask. It’s the same word I just handed him, in the tongue he came up in.
Stay with me. I taught him mine tonight.
He’s carried it his whole life and never once spent it on anyone.
And there’s the blade in the sweetness, right on schedule, because I can’t.
That’s the arithmetic under all of it, the number I keep in my boot even here, even now.
The day his six months are up, the program graduates him and the season takes him back, and the whole architecture of our lives is built to pull us apart the moment his placement ends.
I taught him a word he’s going to have to unlearn.
I don’t say any of it. Tonight I let something be good without pricing it out loud, the single most reckless thing I have ever done, harder than any no I’ve ever held.
We drive home in the dark with his hand on my knee and the county coming up around us like water closing over a held breath, and I feel myself putting it back on a mile at a time, the reader, the director, the woman who watches the door, the closer we get to my gate.
By the cattle guard I’m most of the way back into her.
But not all the way. What he did tonight I’ll be a long time counting. He drove me two counties out of my own life and showed me the woman I’d have been if I’d ever once let myself, and now I’ve met her, and I don’t know how you go back to not having met her.
“Thank you,” I tell him at the dark edge of the yard, and I mean it in a language neither of us has a word for.
“Quédate,” he says. Wrong context, wrong grammar, exactly right.
I don’t. I go up to the house alone, because the men are close and the risk is real and some habits I don’t get to put down yet.
But I stand at my window a long time and watch the bunkhouse light, and I think: eleven days, or twelve, or however many I get, I’m going to spend every one of them being the woman I met tonight, for as long as the world lets me.
And I already know the world is drafting the letter that ends it.
Let it come.
I danced tonight. First time in years. I’d forgotten I knew how.