23. Catalina
Chapter twenty-three
Catalina
Vicente knows something’s wrong before I’ve poured the first coffee, because Vicente has known me since I was tall enough to see over the fence rail and there has never been a version of me he couldn’t read.
He doesn’t say it. That’s not him. He turns up at the tack room at first light the way he turns up wherever the trouble is, and he looks at me a second too long over the bridle he’s mending, and goes back to it.
“Say it,” I tell him.
“Didn’t say anything.”
“You looked it.”
“Can’t help my face.” He works the leather. “You’re carrying something. Have been a week. Two.” A pause, the leather creaking. “None of my business which.”
That’s Vicente. He’ll tell you he sees it and then hand you the door, every time, because in twenty years the way he’s kept my trust is by never forcing it.
“There’s a review coming,” I say. “The county. Off-cycle. It’s Sebastian, dressed up in letterhead.”
He nods slow, like this confirms what he’d already half-built. “The funding.”
“The funding.”
“And you’re handling it alone.” Not a question. “The way you handle everything alone.”
“It’s my ranch, Vicente.”
“It is.” He sets the bridle down. This is what disarms me about Vicente, every time: he doesn’t come at you soft and he doesn’t come at you loud.
He comes at you sideways and true. “Twenty years I’ve watched your father carry things alone that a wiser man would’ve set down or shared.
Still does it, sits up in that house with his robes off and a bad hip and carries the whole county in his head because he never trusted anybody else to carry it right.
” He picks the bridle back up. “Good man. Best I know. And it cost him more of his life than he’ll ever get back, and he’d tell you himself if he had the words for it, which he doesn’t, because you Delgados never do.
” A beat. “You’ve got his hands. You’ve also got his habit of standing between everything you love and the weather, so nobody you love ever has to get wet, and calling that strength. ”
I don’t say anything, because there’s nothing to say when it lands that square.
“There’s a difference,” he says, quiet, to the leather, “between running a life and living one. Your father never found it. I’d hate to watch you not find it either, over a man like Sebastian, who isn’t worth the water off your hat.”
“I’ll handle it,” I tell him.
“I know you will.” He hangs the bridle on its peg. “That’s what worries me.”
Then I go help Vicente with the feed, and I don’t fix anything, and the letter stays in my pocket where the oldest, surest part of me has decided it’s safest for everyone.
I’ve never been able to tell, in the moment, whether that part of me is protecting the people I love or protecting itself.
Tomorrow. I’ll know tomorrow.
I’ve gotten good at tomorrow. It’s the one fence I never fix.