Page 10 of The Reckless Rookie

They are not on my side of the table.

There is no my side of the table.

Bob didn’t call me here to fight for me. He called me here to get me gone. An hour up a county road, out of San Antonio and off the feeds for six months, until the city loses interest in a ten-second clip. The ranch isn’t a rescue. It’s a place to keep the embarrassing thing until it stops being news.

“It’s over an hour to the ranch,” I say. “One way. It’s the back half of the season. It’s the playoffs if we hold on. When am I supposed to get the extra ice?”

“The ice is protected,” Bob says. “That was settled before you walked in. Twenty-five ranch hours a week during the season, scheduled around practice, games, treatment, meetings, and travel. When you are at the ranch, you do whatever work they give you. When you are here, you do not miss one team obligation.” He folds his hands. “You are a rookie with a felony charge attached to your name. I do not need a pattern to know what that can cost this organization.”

There’s no history for him to recite and no banked goodwill for me to spend. That’s the point.

“You’re good. You might be great. Right now you’re a rookie facing your first infraction with this organization, and it comes with a felony charge. You have not earned enough trust for anyone to defend you on reputation alone. Complete this clean, or this organization moves on.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good.”

He looks back down at whatever was on his desk before I walked in. That’s how I know I’m done. That’s how I know that to Bob Hartley I was a twenty-minute line item, and now I’m handled.

I stand up.

Nobody shakes my hand.

I drive back to the condo near the arena that still smells like somebody else’s paint, and I sit in it in the dark and don’t pack.

I go looking for a fight.

That’s what I do. What I’m for. If somebody hits me, I hit back harder. If somebody boxes me in, I find the corner and come out swinging. I’m in my living room, trying to find the scenario where I’m the winner. The appeal. The angle. It’s a story about me, and it happened to me.

It isn’t there.

I look everywhere I’ve ever kept one, and the shelf is empty, and what’s sitting there instead is a judge’s voice with no heat in it. That you stopped walking is the reason it’s a felony at all. I don’t have an answer for that.

I’ve spent all afternoon looking and there isn’t one, and that, not the cuffs, not Bob not shaking my hand, is the worst thing that’s happened to me all day. A man like me can survive almost anything except running out of somebody else to blame.

I pack a bag.

Then a second one, because I’ve got no idea what a man wears to shovel whatever they’re going to have me shovel. Horses, probably. I’ve never touched a horse in my life. Feels about right for the week I’m having.

I go.

Because there’s no version where I don’t. And because underneath all of it, way down in a place I’m not ready to look at yet, some small part of me isn’t fighting this at all.

Chapter five

Catalina

Sebastian comes out the Saturday before O’Sullivan’s due to arrive, which tells me he thinks this is a project he can finish before his afternoon opens up.

He parks the German car at an angle that keeps both tires off the gravel he doesn’t like, gets out in weekend clothes that cost more than my work ones, and takes a slow look at the place like he’s appraising it. He does that every time. Three years and he’s never looked at the ranch and seen the ranch. He looks at it and sees square footage and a tax structure and a story he can tell at dinner about the woman he’s seeing who runs a whole spread out in the county, can you believe it?

“You look good,” he says, kissing my cheek. “Rugged. It suits you.”

“You want coffee, or you want to say the thing you drove out here to say?”

He laughs as if I’m charming. “Straight to it. I’ve always liked that.” He has never liked that. He likes it in the story. In the room it makes him tighten around the eyes, the way it does now.

We walk. He keeps to the packed dirt, and I let him, and Vicente lifts two fingers off a fence rail in a way that means I’ve got eyes on this if you need me, and I lift one back that means I’ve got it, and Sebastian misses the entire exchange because he’s already talking.