Page 12 of The Reckless Rookie

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.

Chapter six

Catalina

He’s early.

That’s the first thing, and it tells me more than the file did. Placements are never early. They come at the back edge of whatever window the court gave them, sometimes later, because nobody hurries toward six months of somebody else’s rules. His truck turns off the county road at ten to eight for an eight o’clock start, and he parks it square between the lines of a lot that doesn’t have lines, and sits in it for a second before he gets out.

Getting his face on. I know the move. I’ve watched a hundred men do it in that same patch of gravel.

Then he’s out, and I revise the file.

Smaller than the footage made him look, the way the truly dangerous ones usually are. He moves careful across the gravel, favoring a knee he’s trying not to favor, and he’s got a duffel over one shoulder and nothing on his face at all, which is its own kind of tell. A man who’s decided to give you nothing has usually got plenty he’s deciding about.

“Ms. Delgado.” He puts out a hand. “Finn O’Sullivan.”

“I know who you are.”

“Figured.” A beat. Not a flinch, just a recalibration, quick, like a man who’s found the ice tilted and adjusted his feet. “Where do you want me?”

Not what am I doing here or this is a mistake or any of the forty things the angry ones open with. Where do you want me? I file it next to the early.

“During the season, the county has you at twenty-five hours a week, arranged around mandatory team obligations. That’s scheduling, not privilege. When you are here, you do the work everybody does, eat what everybody eats, and a city paying to watch you skate buys you exactly nothing. Are we clear on that part?”

“Real clear.”

“Some of the men out here will want to fight you. A couple will want your autograph. Both are your problem, not mine. Vicente runs your work and you answer to him for it. Anything that’s the court’s business, a violation, a report, goes through your county officer, not me. I own this ranch. I don’t own your case, and I wouldn’t want to.” I let that land, because it’s the part people always get wrong about how this works. “But understand the shape of what you signed. One serious violation out here, another fight, another charge, and the deal can collapse on its own. I don’t lift a finger or make a call. One strike and the court can have you back on a felony you’re pretending isn’t there, somewhere with a fence you can’t see over.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

No heat back. No wounded pride, no you don’t know what I’ve been through. He takes it, steady, a man absorbing a scouting report on a team he hasn’t played yet. It would be easier if he were arrogant. Arrogant I can manage in my sleep. This quiet, level thing he’s doing is harder to place, and I don’t like not being able to place a man on his first morning.

“Come on. I’ll walk you up.”

Juniper, the red heeler, falls in at my heel before we clear the porch. Six chickens scatter from the feed shed as if O’Sullivan personally offended them, and Mabel, the potbellied pig, grunts from beneath the water trough where she has no business sleeping.

He looks from the dog to the pig. “This place come with a roster?”

“Everybody works,” I say. “Mabel is in active violation.”

We go past the near paddock and he slows.

He doesn’t mean to. I notice it because noticing is the job. His feet come off their pace for half a step, and his head turns, and I follow the line of it to see what caught him.

Bonita.

Of course it’s Bonita. Six horses in that paddock, five of them doing the sensible morning thing, standing hip-shot in the cool working on the last of the hay. And then there’s Bonita at the far rail, already lathered at the neck at eight in the morning over nothing, walking the fence line the way she walks it every day, down and back, down and back, looking for the gap that isn’t there. She’s carrying, months out from foaling yet, and it hasn’t slowed her an inch. If anything she’s worse for it. A body that won’t settle even when settling is the only sane thing left to do.