Page 22 of The Reckless Rookie

My mother is on my porch by nine, which means this isn’t a visit. It’s a correction.

The main house is only a hundred and fifty yards away, but it faces the south pasture. Mine sits behind the barn and the live oaks, with the drive coming in from the opposite side. Close enough for my mother to walk over. Far enough out of sight that she has to mean to come looking.

Elena comes onto every surface like it has been waiting for her, and she has two coffees from the good place in town because my mother believes in arriving with leverage.

“You look tired,” she says. “You’re working too hard out here for what it gives you.”

“Morning, Mamá.”

“I talked to Sebastian.”

And there it is, before she’s even in the chair. I take the coffee because refusing it would be a whole conversation and I’m saving my no for what’s coming.

“He’s worried about you,” she says. “Out here alone with those men, running yourself down over a program that barely…” She stops, because even she won’t say barely pays, not to my face, not when we both know the number. “He thinks you were hasty. He’s willing to be patient.”

“He’s not worried about me. He’s worried about the account.”

“Catalina.” The whole name, the way Sebastian says it, and I wonder for the ten-thousandth time if she taught it to him or he taught it to her.

“He’s a good man. He’s the right kind of man. Do you know how few of those come out this far into the county for a woman who smells like a horse?”

She means it kindly. That’s my mother. Every cruel thing she has ever said to me, she has said while holding something she crossed the yard to bring.

There’s something she’ll never see, and I’ve stopped trying to make her. She reads the résumé. The firm, the car, the way Sebastian pulls out a chair. She sees a daughter who landed where a Delgado daughter’s supposed to land and then walked away from it to shovel out stalls in the middle of nowhere, and she cannot for the life of her understand why, and she never considered that I read the man instead of the paper and found nothing under it but a man who never learned my name. But she’s not entirely wrong, and that’s what keeps me sitting here taking it.

Because this place, mine, mine, not a line item the family votes on twice a year, runs on a margin I’m always one bad season from losing. And the way out, the real way out, what ends the vote forever, is a placement like O’Sullivan going right. The program that took the hockey player and gave the state back a whole man doesn’t ask my mother’s people for anything ever again. It gets its own name. It gets a waiting list. It gets free.

And a placement like O’Sullivan going wrong is my mother on this porch for the next ten years, holding a coffee, saying we told her.

I did not fully feel the size of that until last night, in the barn, with his hand at my jaw.

Because the barn isn’t just a broken rule. The barn is exactly what hands her this porch forever.

“He’s going to make some noise,” Elena says, standing, because she’s said her piece and my mother never overstays her leverage. “Sebastian. About the placement, about the funding, I don’t know the details. I don’t want you blindsided by a man you could have kept happy.”

She kisses my cheek, and she’s gone in a cloud of good perfume and better intentions, and I stand on my own porch holding a coffee I didn’t want, doing the small cold math I didn’t ask to do.

Make some noise. About the funding.

He knows what keeps the program alive: the county contract. He always did. And I took away the version of him that had any reason not to use that knowledge against me.

I go back out to the fence, because the weak spots there at least hold still while I fix them.

Out at the fence I make a call I should have made a week ago.

The county officer picks up on the second ring. He’s had O’Sullivan’s file since the placement started: the hours, the check-ins, the paper that says whether a man is keeping his end. I tell him I want all of it in his hands now. Every sign-off, every report, every question about O’Sullivan’s standing decided by the county and not by me. Vicente runs the work; the officer runs the record; I want my name off the part that can send a man back to a cell. In writing. Today.

A pause on the line. He’s known me eight years and I’ve never asked him for this.

“Any particular reason, Ms. Delgado?”

“Conflict of interest.” I keep my voice level, which costs more than I expect. “That’s all that needs to go in the file.”

He doesn’t push. “I’ll log it this afternoon.”

I hang up and stand there with the phone warm in my palm, and I make myself say the true thing, at least to the fence. Eight years. Forty men. I have never recused myself from a single one, because I never needed to; not once did I fail to trust myself with a man who owed the court his freedom. It’s in writing now that O’Sullivan is the exception. I told the county, in the only language the county reads, exactly how far gone I am.

And I did it anyway. Because I will not be a woman who wants a man she can still send to prison. That much I get to decide, so I decide it, and it’s the only clean thing I’ve done since the barn.