Chapter 7: The Roaster

Eloy's POV

I paid her note on Monday morning at nine, and I did not tell her.

I told myself it was the hangar and not the woman.

My father's pepper had flown from that hangar for twenty-six years.

I would not watch a bank padlock it because her husband had stolen the money.

That was what I told myself in the bank lobby with a cashier's check in my hand.

By Monday night I knew it was a lie, and I was in the roasting shed pretending to work.

The shed is a tin building at the end of the farm stand lot.

At night it holds the heat of the day.

I run the wholesale batch after midnight for the restaurants in town.

The drum turns and the propane roars.

Eighty pounds of green chile blister and split and fill the air with smoke and sugar.

My father taught me to stand in that smell when I couldn't think.

It had worked every night for two years.

It did not work tonight.

I kept seeing her in the hangar with the red nylon under her back, saying my name to the roof.

I kept seeing her at my mother's table with her hands folded, being polite.

I kept hearing her on my portal, tired and certain: I think you don't know yet.

She was right.

I had been engaged to a woman for two years, and I had never once wanted to know where she was.

I wanted to know where Adelina Sedillo was every minute of the day.

That was not the same thing, and I knew it, and it frightened me.

Four nights ago, at ten past three in the morning, the gate camera had sent a picture to my phone.

I had been awake anyway.

I looked at that picture for a long time and then I got dressed.

Everything since had gone downhill, and I had let it.

My mother had not eaten since Sunday.

I had checked the photograph in her front hall myself.

The frame was not broken.

It was the picture of the Mass Ascension in 1993, with my father on the field in his sheepskin, thirty years younger and laughing.

She had laid it face down on the table and would not tell me why.

I pushed the thought away.

I loaded the drum.

The door slid open behind me, and I knew who it was before I turned.

Keep reading free with an account. Start She Slept With My Husband, So Her Fiance Rides My Balloon from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.