She Slept With My Husband, So Her Fiance Rides My Balloon novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Pepper, This Is Chase

Eloy drives chase on her first clean dawn flight, lifts her out of the basket and does not let go of her waist, and that night Corina comes with a check for the hangar note and a statement to sign, and tells Adelina what Nestor wants.

"Pepper, this is Chase," said the radio on my shoulder. "I have you in sight. You are very red."

"Chase, you're not supposed to say that on this channel," I said.

"I don't know the channel," Eloy said. "I know the color."

I was nine hundred feet over his hay fields with ninety feet of red nylon over my head.

I was laughing.

I had not laughed on a flight since June.

Six of the foreman's pickers had laid the pepper out on the wet grass before dawn and held her mouth open for the fan.

They did it in silence and with great care, and nobody had told them to.

The director of the Fiesta sat in his car on the county road with a thermos on his dash.

He had come to watch me fly clean, so I flew clean.

I rode the low air south and let the burner rest.

At the turn I climbed into the north wind and came back over the cottonwoods in a long, easy loop.

"Pepper, Chase. Are you going to land in my alfalfa?" Eloy asked.

"Chase, that depends on who's asking," I said.

"The man who owns the alfalfa."

"Then yes," I said.

I put her down in the far corner of his field, in the dew.

The pickers ran in over the stubble to catch the ropes.

The basket touched and tipped and settled.

The director's car turned around in the road and left, and he lifted two fingers off the wheel as he passed.

I took that for a yes about the pepper.

Eloy came across the field at a walk, which was the only speed I'd seen him use.

He didn't say anything.

He put both hands around my waist and lifted me out over the wicker lip.

He set me down on the grass.

His hands stayed there.

I could feel each finger through my jacket.

I looked up, and he was breathing in through his nose, slowly, and looking past my shoulder at the ditch.

A muscle moved in his jaw.

He was tired, I told myself.

He had been up since three, and a man who is that tired breathes oddly when he catches a woman over a basket.

"That was a clean flight," he said.

"I know."

"I don't know anything about the sky. I could tell it was clean."

He took his hands off me, one at a time.

I spent the rest of the morning being busy with ropes.

That night I was alone in the hangar at nine, checking the pepper's burner hoses.

Headlights came across the gravel.

A white SUV rolled to a stop in front of the open door.

Corina Lovato stepped out in a pale blouse and a good perfume and walked into my hangar, unhurried and uninvited.

"Adelina," she said. "I'll be quick."

She set a cashier's check on the workbench, and next to it a typed page.

I read the check first.

Forty-one thousand dollars, to the bank that held my father's hangar.

"That's the whole note," Corina said. "I'll pay it. Nobody needs to know where it came from."

I read the page.

It said that I, Adelina Sedillo, had been unwell on the morning of August twenty-seventh.

It said I regretted my actions and withdrew any claim to the pepper balloon.

"Sign it," Corina said. "The station will do a nice piece on a pilot's recovery, and you keep your hangar."

"And the pepper?" I asked.

"Nestor flies it. You'd be amazed what he can do with a thing once it's his."

"Does Eloy know you're here?" I asked.

She laughed, a short, polished laugh from a hundred weather segments.

"Eloy doesn't know what he wants," Corina said. "He wanted a wife who matched the house, and I matched the house."

She leaned on my workbench.

"Nestor wants something else. He told me he'd be sitting at the Armijo table before I was."

"What does that mean?" I asked.

"He doesn't lie about what he wants," Corina said. "It means sign."

I picked up the check and tore it in half.

Then I tore the halves in half and laid the pieces on her typed page.

I slid it back across the bench to her.

"You can go now," I said.

She looked at the pieces.

"He said you'd be grateful," she said quietly. "He said you'd cry and thank me for the attention."

She walked out, and her tires went down the gravel.

I stood in the empty hangar and turned the sentence about the table over and over.

It would not mean anything.

At eleven I gave up and got in my truck.

I drove four miles south in the dark, past the roasting sheds, to the end of the ditch road.

One yellow window was still lit in the old adobe farmhouse.

I knocked on the door at midnight.

I had not known until I was standing on his step that I was going to.

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