Page 54 of The Reckless Rookie

“What changed?”

“Sebastian filed the county complaint against Catt’s program after I threatened him. His firm keeps turning up around the civil case. Find out why.”

The line goes quiet. Then I hear a keyboard.

“His firm is counsel on the civil claim,” Marcus says. “That gives them access to discovery, including footage. Preservation demand today. Subpoena if they don’t produce. I want the chain of custody and every communication about the tape.”

“Good.”

For once, fighting means staying on the phone long enough to let the right person do his job.

I pack. It doesn’t take long. I kept everything movable my whole life, and it turns out that comes back like riding a bike.

I go see Bonita before I go. I’m not supposed to. I don’t care.

She comes to the rail heavy and slow, close to her time, and puts her head against my chest, and I stand there with my hand on her neck and think the stupidest thought I’ve had in a long life of stupid thoughts, which is that I’m going to miss a horse worse than I’ve ever missed a person. It’s not even true. It’s easier to hold than the true one.

“You’re going to be fine,” I tell her, and I don’t know if I’m talking to her or practicing. “You’ve got Vicente. You’ve got her. You already did the scary part.”

She doesn’t know I’m leaving. That’s the mercy in animals. She leans on me the way she did the night I earned it, and I let her, and I stand there and pay attention on purpose, because I’ve learned you don’t always get told which time is the last time, and I’m done wasting the lasts I do get to see coming.

Jason finds me at the truck.

“They’re moving you.” He says it like I did it to him. “Because of the gala. Because you…” He stops. Everybody on this ranch goes careful around her.

“Because I’m a liability, Jase. Which I am.”

“That’s garbage. You walked into a stall and saved my life this week.”

“Both things are true.” And that’s what I’ve got now that I didn’t have before, standing next to a half-loaded truck. A man can do the best thing he’s ever done and the worst thing he’s ever done in the same week, and the world doesn’t average them out. It keeps the one it can use.

He looks like he wants to hit something for me, and I put a hand on his shoulder, and I give him the only thing I’ve got worth leaving behind.

“Finish your program. Get your kid back. Don’t ever hand anybody a reason.” I hold his eyes. “Don’t be me. Be smarter than me.”

His jaw works and he nods, and I get in the truck before either of us has to do anything else about our faces.

I get to the end of the county road, to the stop sign where it’s left for the highway and right for one more look at a place I’ve got no right to look at anymore, and I sit there with the truck running.

Every part of me wants to turn right. Turn right, go back, make her look at me, tell her I’ll take the risk, tell her I’ll disappear into the bunkhouse and never make another headline as long as I live, fight for the one place that ever made me into somebody. My hands are on the wheel to do it.

And then I follow it all the way out, the way I’ve been learning to. If I plant myself on her porch and refuse to be moved, what does that get her? A man with a record, parked at the ranch under review. A scene. Something a neighbor sees. One more line for a county that’s already reading her too close. Me fighting to stay is the exact thing that finishes her.

The most I can do for her is go left. Go quiet. Be gone before I cost her anything else.

I sit at that stop sign a long time.

Then I go left.

I don’t tell myself it makes me a better man. It feels like losing. But I do it, and nobody sees, and I think that’s the loneliest part of the whole night. The one decent thing I’ve got in me is invisible, driving me away from her at forty miles an hour in the dark.

I make it about six miles before I have to pull over.

I don’t cry, exactly. I put the hazards on and I sit on the shoulder with my hands at ten and two on a wheel that isn’t going anywhere, and I let it be as bad as it is. I don’t drink it away. I don’t turn around. I don’t drive to some bar in the next town and find somebody to make me feel like a person for an hour, and God knows that door’s open, that door’s always open for a guy like me and nobody’d think twice. I don’t want the hour. I want what I can’t have, and pretending otherwise is just another way of swinging at something.

So I sit in it. The way she taught me without meaning to. The way the horse taught me. Don’t run from it, don’t swing at it, stand in it until it stops being able to put you down.

It takes a lot longer than a minute.