She Slept With My Husband, So Her Fiance Rides My Balloon novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Landing
Eloy Armijo shows Adelina gate-camera proof that her ex-husband and his fiancee meet at the end of his ditch road every dawn, and she flies him down the river on the morning wind and lands on the two of them in front of thirty pickers, then takes the truck key out of Nestor's hand and lifts off.
The man who walked into my hangar at half past four in the morning wanted to know which truck was my husband's.
I told him I had been divorced ten weeks.
"I know," said Eloy.
His family owned the field the pepper balloon flew from every October.
In all the years I had flown for him he had never once stood inside my hangar.
He stood in the doorway now with his hat in his hand and held out his phone.
"This is my gate camera," he said. "Tell me if you know the truck."
It was a white pickup with my company's name on the door in red letters my father had picked out himself.
It sat at the end of his ditch road under the cottonwoods with its lights off.
A white SUV was parked nose to tail with it.
"That's Nestor's truck," I said. "It's my truck. The title's in my name."
"That's what I thought."
Eloy swiped the screen with his thumb.
Same truck, same SUV, a gray square on a cracked phone, a different morning each time.
"Ten weeks," he said. "They get there around five, and he drives out at six."
I counted back on my fingers.
The first picture was dated the morning after Nestor moved out.
For ten weeks I had told anyone who asked that he needed to find himself.
I had also told myself I was the kind of woman a man needs to find himself away from.
"Whose is the SUV?" I asked.
"My fiancee's."
He said it flat, and his jaw barely moved.
His hands were scarred across the knuckles from irrigation gates, and they were perfectly steady.
"I could drive down there," Eloy said. "They'd hear my tires on the gravel."
"So?" I said.
"They'd be dressed by the time I got out. I want to see it. And I want a witness who isn't mine."
"Why me?" I asked.
"You're the only other person it happened to."
I was already at the door, looking at the sky.
There was a skin of cold air lying on the ground, sliding south down the river valley.
Three hundred feet above it, I knew, the air ran the other way.
I had flown that box of wind since I was sixteen.
A balloon cannot be steered, but it can be put at the right height.
If I rode the low air four miles south, I could come in over his cottonwoods with the burner off.
Not a sound would give us away.
"Get in," I said.
The pepper sat at the back of the hangar with its instrument panel bare.
The one brass altimeter Nestor ever cared about was in my junk drawer.
We laid out the blue in the dark and filled her with the fan.
He did everything I told him, quickly and without a word.
At first light I stood in the basket with my hand on the burner valve, and the hand would not stop shaking.
His hand came down over mine.
It covered the whole valve and most of my wrist, and it was warm.
"You're cold," he said.
"It's sixty degrees."
"Then you're something else."
I did not say what.
I opened the valve, and the burner roared, and the ground let go of us.
We went south on the low air, with the river going silver under us and the roasting sheds still dark.
He watched the ditch road come up out of the trees and did not blink.
When the white truck showed between the cottonwoods I killed the burner.
I let her sink, and sink, and put the basket down in the gravel lane, right in front of the tailgate.
Thirty chile pickers were coming down the lane from the vans for the morning shift, with their sacks over their shoulders.
They stopped where they stood, and two of them took the basket ropes out of my hands without being asked.
The foreman took the third.
Nestor was at the tailgate with his shirt in his hand.
Corina Lovato, who read the morning weather on television, stood beside him with her blouse buttoned wrong.
"Del," Nestor said. "Del, you don't understand."
Corina turned to the pickers and used her weather voice.
"Adelina, this is a private matter," she said. "Everybody go back to your vans, please."
Nobody went anywhere.
The foreman looked at Eloy, and Eloy stepped out of the basket onto his own gravel.
He walked to Corina and stopped in front of her.
She held out her left hand, with the small gold ring on it, and said, "Eloy, listen to me."
He slid the ring off her finger himself, put it in his shirt pocket and did not look at it again.
Then he turned and looked at the man who had lived in my house for six years.
Nestor gave him the smile that had gotten him through every room I had ever walked into with him.
"Let's talk like adults," Nestor said.
"I understand the truck," I said.
I crossed the gravel and took the key out of his hand.
It was still warm from his pocket.
"It has my name on the door," I said.
I climbed back into the basket, and Eloy Armijo climbed in after me without being asked.
"Suelten," I told the foreman, and the pickers let go of the ropes.
I lit the burner and went up through the cottonwoods with the key in my fist.
My ex-husband stood in the lane below, watching me leave.
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