25. Catalina
Chapter twenty-five
Catalina
Three weeks after the first letter, the county stops being polite about it.
The second one doesn’t say routine. It says formal notice of comprehensive review, Delgado Ranch placement program, full records requested inside fourteen days, a hearing date, and the phrase they bury in the third paragraph where they put the ones that matter: pursuant to concerns regarding suitability and supervision.
Concerns. Somebody raised concerns. Off-cycle, out of nowhere, with a deadline and a demand for every file I keep.
I don’t go through this one twice at the counter the way I did the first. Once is enough, and I set the coffee down carefully, because my hand isn’t steady and I don’t want to hear it rattle in the empty kitchen, and I let it be true.
This is what I’ve been managing since the phone rang in this kitchen weeks ago. It stopped being a shadow on the wall. It’s on my counter now, in triplicate, with a deadline.
I know it’s Sebastian before I’ve finished the notice. I don’t need proof. I’ve spent three years learning the shape of his hand, the way you learn a man’s handwriting, and this has his fingerprints on every line of it.
He didn’t threaten me. He never threatens.
He arranges. Somewhere in a paneled office he mentioned to the right person over the right lunch that the county might want to take a closer look at Judge Delgado’s daughter and her high-profile placement, the hockey player, the one with the assault charge, all that liability sitting out on a ranch with at-risk placements.
He didn’t lie. He didn’t have to. He aimed the machinery and stepped back and let process do what process does, and now there’s a review with a date on it and his name nowhere on the paper.
Three weeks after Finn arrived, I filed a conflict-of-interest notice and removed myself from his formal supervision. Sebastian’s firm works county contracts. The filing is available to anyone who knows where to ask, and he knows exactly where to ask.
He doesn’t have to know Finn has been in my bed. He only has to suggest that my recusal hid a personal interest, then wait for the county to investigate the question.
I call him. I don’t decide to; my hand does it, the old reflex, take the danger somewhere I can see it.
“Catalina.” Warm. Delighted, almost. “I was hoping you’d call.”
“Call it off.”
“Call what off? I’m not sure I know what you mean.
” And he doesn’t stop there, because the cruelty is in the performance.
“Though I did hear the county’s taking a look at some of the placement programs. Routine, I’d imagine.
Nothing to worry about if everything’s in order out there.
” A pause built like a trap. “It is all in order, isn’t it? Your Mr. O’Sullivan behaving himself?”
There it is. The knife, wrapped in concern, handed to me handle-first so that if I grab it I’m the one who bleeds.
“Goodbye, Sebastian.”
“Give my best to your father,” he says, and I hang up on the sound of him enjoying himself.
He wants me to know it’s him. People never understand men like Sebastian. The point was never to hide it. The point is for me to know exactly who did this and be completely unable to prove a word.
My father walks over from the main house that afternoon, which tells me the water’s higher than even I knew, because Armando Delgado mostly leaves me to run my own place, and when he crosses the hundred and fifty yards between his porch and mine, it’s never about something small.
He stands at my kitchen counter where the letter still sits, and he reads it without picking it up, hands in his pockets, the way he used to read a brief he already knew the ending to.
“Diaz called me last night,” he says.
“Dad.”
“He’s worried, m’ija. He doesn’t say worried.
Ramón and I have been friends forty years, and he called at nine at night to ask how the ranch was doing, which he has never cared about, so.
” He turns from the letter. “You want to tell me what’s happening, or you want to keep managing me like I’m one of your county people. ”
I don’t say anything. That’s answer enough for a man who spent twenty years reading silences from the bench.
“Here’s what’s happening,” he says, gentler, which is worse.
“If this review goes badly, if that young man of yours puts one foot wrong while the county’s got a magnifying glass on you, it isn’t your contract.
It’s Ramón Diaz’s judgment on the record, in an election year, for vouching for a placement everybody can see coming a mile off.
It’s my name, because it’s my ranch and my daughter and my oldest friend all in one sentence in a newspaper nobody’s written yet.
You didn’t bet your program on this boy, Catalina.
” He taps the letter, once. “You bet mine. And Ramón’s.
You bet the whole table and you didn’t tell any of us the stakes had gone up. ”
He walks back toward the main house as the light goes, slower than he used to, one hand trailing the fence rail the way he never needed to before, and I stand in the yard and watch him go and feel the weight settle onto me at once, more than I let him see.
Because there’s something I didn’t say to my father. Something I can’t say to anybody.
The loaded gun points at all of it, my program, Diaz’s career, my father’s name, everything three generations built.
The loaded gun is a man I can’t stop thinking about.
I took Finn as a bet on myself, proof I could run this without the family, without a husband, without anybody.
And somewhere in the post-holes and the stolen midnights that bet turned into something with no ledger for it, something I don’t have a word I’m willing to use for, and now what I feel most in the world and the thing that can destroy my whole life are the same person, wearing the same crooked smile, an hour south of here playing a game I can’t stop watching.
If this goes wrong I don’t lose the ranch. I lose the ranch and him.
Or I save the ranch by cutting him loose before he can sink it, which is the same as losing him with my own two hands.
I stand in the dark yard and I feel the old reflex come up in me, the one that’s kept me standing my whole life.
Manage it. Contain it. Carry it alone so nobody you love has to feel the weight.
Don’t tell him. Telling him makes it his, and makes it real, and gives him a vote in what I can decide more cleanly by myself.
I go inside and I put the letter in the drawer with the other one, and I don’t call him, and I tell myself it’s mercy.
I’ve gotten good at telling myself things in this kitchen.