The Ranch She Left Behind (17 page)

He didn’t.

In fact, sleep was the last thing on his mind. His daughter had come to him last night, expressing a desire, out of nowhere, to take a hot air balloon ride. Even more amazingly, she wanted to take it with
him.

So by God, he was going to make it happen.

If he could just find the darn hot air balloon company’s building. And they had to find it in the next ten minutes, or else they’d miss the 9:00 a.m. ride.

For some reason getting on that balloon—and
only
that balloon—had become the most important thing in Ellen’s world. Until he got home last night, and she began lobbying him, he’d had no idea she even knew what a hot air balloon was, much less cherished a dream of riding in one.

It was a beautiful morning for it, though. Cool, but not cold. A cloudless blue sky that went on forever. Hardly any wind, which seemed like a good thing, though he really didn’t know much about ballooning himself.

And he darn sure didn’t know how to get to this Air Adventures Incorporated place. They’d given him directions over the phone, when he made the reservations. Plus, he’d asked at the gas station as he left town, just to be sure.

But in these small towns directions were iffy, at best. People said things like, “It’s about half a mile beyond where that old elm was struck by lightning in ‘eighty-five,” or “Just park between the riverbank and that big rock they can’t get rid of.”

Every landmark was where something
used
to be, or where something memorable had happened long ago. If you didn’t have a history here, you were out of luck.

“There it is!” Ellen bounced in her seat, pointing through the window. “See?”

Max had spotted the small Air Adventures trailer, too, but he let her have the victory. He turned the wheel, smiling—not just because he was glad to find the place, but also because that uninhibited eagerness used to be a hallmark of his little girl.

Maybe five years ago, Ellen had been nothing but laughter and enthusiasm. His nickname for her had been Bubbles. What had happened to all that delightful effervescence?

Was it his promotion, which necessitated the extra traveling? Was it sending her to that ridiculously snobbish elementary school, full of affected, world-weary first-graders? Was it Lydia, or the loss of Lydia? Was it Mexico?

Perhaps it had been all those things.

But identifying the cause, assigning the blame, was pointless. Somewhere along the way, his family had taken a wrong turn on the happiness road, and they’d been wandering in the darkness ever since. The only important thing was finding their way back.

“Good eye,” he said, careful not to let it sound patronizing. “If we’d driven past that trailer, we would have been in Nevada before we realized we were lost.”

She was clearly not listening. She leaned against her door, craning her neck and squinting, as if the balloon would be difficult to spot and she didn’t want to miss it.

Hardly. As they pulled in, cresting a gentle, rounded rise in the land, they suddenly saw the balloon, lying nearly flat on the ground, stretched out in huge, impressive stripes of bold color—blue and yellow and red and white.

“Is that…” Ellen stopped bouncing. “Is that…”

“That’s the balloon. They haven’t filled it yet, which is a good thing, because it means we’re not too late.”

He found a good parking space, though a surprising number of cars already filled the small lot beside the trailer. A few yards away from the balloon and its impossibly small wicker basket, a large knot of people in long sleeves and sweaters milled around, avidly watching the process.

Max had been told that the basket held four, and they’d be going up with one or two others. No way that whole crowd was going with them. Must be people waiting for the next flight, or maybe other members of Air Adventures staff.

Someone turned on a large, noisy fan—the din roaring back toward Max and Ellen, even though they had just emerged from the SUV. He felt a small warmth burrow into his hand, and, looking down, saw that Ellen had braided her fingers into his, as she used to do when she was very small.

His heart twisted. His feisty little girl was afraid.

“It’s neat, isn’t it?” He pretended not to notice. “I’m glad we got here in time to see how they get the balloon filled up. They’ll fill it with air from that fan, and then they’ll heat the air to make the balloon lift up.”

Ellen kept walking, but her fingers tightened as they drew closer. He wondered how much reassurance he should offer. He could tell her how thoroughly he’d checked the company out this morning, while she got ready. Air Adventures had been offering flights around here for more than a decade. The pilot had logged thousands of trips, with no incidents at all.

Licenses, insurances, safety records—it all checked out. But would those details reassure her, as they had him? Or would they just remind her of the dangers?

“The pilot is named Eagle Ed,” he said, settling for the human interest angle. “They call him that because apparently he feels more at home in the air than on the ground.”

Ellen glanced up at him. “Really?”

“Yeah. Cool, huh?”

Her grip relaxed slightly, and so did his heart. He wanted to believe he could give her comfort when she needed it—that she trusted him enough to feel safe by his side, no matter what. He’d never felt fear in his life, not until Mexico, and he didn’t want her to feel it, either.

They’d almost reached the crowd now, and Max began examining people individually, trying to pick out Eagle Ed from the customers and crew. He’d seen the pilot’s picture on the website—not a huge guy, brown hair, a mustache, big smile with white teeth. In the picture, Eagle Ed looked like someone in a 1920’s barbershop quartet.

He began eliminating people, one by one. Too tall…too muscular…too female… Darn it, Eagle Ed had better not have handed the flight off to another pilot, not now that Max had used him to calm Ellen’s nerves.

And then his eyes collided with a pair of eyes that stared back at him, round and startled. He was completely unprepared, his mind absorbed with locating a man he recognized, not a woman. And certainly not
this
woman.

It was like making sudden eye contact with a deer you were inches away from hitting with your car.

Recognition slammed into him, and suddenly Ellen’s urgency to be in this field, on this particular flight, became as clear as the morning air around them.

He was staring into the wide, shocked eyes of the beautiful Penny Wright.

* * *

P
ARADOXICALLY,
THE
HIGHER
the balloon flew, the calmer Penny felt. She wouldn’t have imagined it possible, but by the time they cleared the treetops, she had actually begun to enjoy herself.

She’d expected to endure the ride in total terror, much as she had on the only other hot air balloon ride she’d ever taken.

And yet…this time…

The whole experience seemed completely different. Instead of being scary, it was thrilling and oddly peaceful. Up here, everything seemed quieter, simpler. She could look down and see where cars slid along gray-ribbon roads, where roads met green fields, where fields met silver rivers.

As she took a deep breath of the clear blue air, she caught Max’s eye.

He smiled. “Feeling better?”

Penny nodded, but before she answered she glanced at Ellen. The girl had obviously relaxed, too. Sometime in the past few minutes, she’d let go of her father’s hand and right now was getting a demonstration of the propane tanks from Eagle Ed.

“Much better,” Penny admitted. She should have known that Max would sense the anxiety she’d tried to mask. “I’m actually enjoying it, which I definitely did not expect. The only other balloon ride I’ve ever taken was such a spectacular failure.”

He smiled. “Failure? How big a failure? You lived to tell the tale, at least.”

“Oh, not that kind of failure, thank goodness.” She shook her head, trying to shake off the horror of the memory. “
I
was the problem, not the balloon.”

“How so?”

She thought back. Many of the simple, physical details, like the color of the balloon, the name of the company, the season and where they’d flown, were lost. But she remembered the emotions as if they’d happened yesterday.

Penny’s father hadn’t ordinarily been tough on her—not as tough as he was on Bree and Ro, anyhow—but when he saw her fear, he’d mocked her mercilessly, repeating everything she said in a high-pitched whine.

When he drew tears, as he must have known he would, he issued strict orders. No one was to touch Penny until she stopped crying. Her mother hadn’t dared to defy him. But Rowena, who was only eleven, had stepped up and scooped Penny into her arms.

“She
can’t
stop crying, you sick bully. Can’t you see that?”

He hadn’t even looked at Rowena. Without so much as a sound, he’d thrust his arms under Penny’s shoulders, ripping her away. Then he held her up and pretended he was going to drop her over the side.

The truly crazy part was that his intention wasn’t even to frighten Penny, really. He wanted to control Rowena. And it had worked. Ironically, Penny’s tears ceased instantly, because she was completely frozen with terror. But proud, defiant Rowena had ended up weeping, begging him to stop. She’d promised anything he asked, just to make him put Penny down.

For months afterward, Rowena had sat up in the barn, plotting horrible deaths for Johnny—and apparently she worked out her fury in those fantasies. But Penny had never quite been the same. She couldn’t sleep alone, because in her dreams she always found herself dangling from clouds, or tree limbs, or cliff edges, her feet blindly churning, trying to find solid ground.

Just remembering it now made her legs start to shake again slightly. She gripped the side of the box and took another deep breath. “Well, I was terrified, which disgusted my father. I don’t remember much else.”

He looked quizzical. “Disgust seems pretty intense. How old were you?”

It had been three days after her sixth birthday. She’d forgotten that part till just now. Johnny had been out of town on the day itself. The balloon idea had been concocted as a late birthday present for Penny.

She shrugged. “Maybe about six.”

Max frowned. “You weren’t allowed to be scared at six?”

“My father didn’t like weakness. He always said we couldn’t be babies, not if we wanted to be ranchers. We needed to grow up.”

“Right.”
Max’s tone was cutting. “Because nothing’s as annoying as an immature first-grader.”

He smiled, and to her surprise she found herself smiling back. Odd, how soothing it was to hear someone stick up for her, even if it was twenty years too late.

“It was a long time ago,” she said. “But thanks.”

Really, she should have forgotten the whole experience and moved on by now. But somehow, that moment of feeling that her father had been willing to jettison her like so much worthless ballast, all because she was a coward…

It had left something inside her that felt like a permanent stain.

No—more like a broken place that couldn’t mend. Like a rotted beam, a faulty support that might let her down at any moment if she put too much pressure on the wrong spot.

A hollow place inside herself, a weak link she couldn’t trust.

She watched the ground below them receding, and realized how much better you could understand geography, and distances, and the relationship of one ranch to the next, one town to the next, if you weren’t so close to it all.

Maybe life was like that, too. Maybe someday, when she got enough perspective on it, the events of her childhood would start to make more sense, too.

“According to him, we were a trio of useless, hothouse flowers, and we needed to toughen up. That was one of his favorite lines.” She had forgotten that, too. “Given how things turned out, perhaps he had a point.”

“Like hell.”
Max shook his head. “I’m sorry, Penny. But it sounds like your dad was a very sick man.”

Penny looked at him, struck by the coincidence. Two decades and two worlds apart, he and Rowena had instinctively chosen the same word.

Sick.
And suddenly, as if she’d finally reached the right height to see the big picture, she knew it was true. Her father hadn’t been all-powerful, all-knowing, all-seeing. He had simply been a very sick man.

He hadn’t possessed the emotional or mental stability to judge or label
anyone.

Penny wasn’t a “coward,” any more than Rowena was a “bitch.” Any more than Bree was a “fool.” Any more than her mother had been a “dirty slut.” All the labels Johnny Wright had hurled at others, all those judgments he’d passed that they’d carried inside for so long, were lies.

They were a product only of the delusional rage that festered inside a very, very sick mind.

And just like that, her memory of those horrifying moments faded. It didn’t go away entirely, but its sharp edges blurred. When she touched the place inside where the phobia lived, she could feel only a dull ache, no worse than a stubbed toe, no longer a knife edge of pain.

She turned to Max. “Thank you,” she said, her voice vibrating with emotion. “Thank you so much.”

He looked surprised, but then he smiled.

“Once again, I don’t know exactly what I did. But…that’s all? Just the words?”

She knew what he meant, of course.

Just words? No kiss?

“Just the words,” she repeated. But she smiled, too, and for a minute the look in his eyes was almost as good as a kiss.

“Dad.” Ellen suddenly tugged Max’s hand. “I thought it would be…like, windy up here.”

“Nope.”

“Why not?”

Eagle Ed, who stood in the corner, his hand above his head, holding on to the rope that could send another blast from the burner to the balloon above them if they began to lose altitude, answered her. “Because we’re going with the wind, not into it.”

“Yeah?” Ellen bit her lower lip, and slowly let her hand drop from Max’s so that she could hold on to the edge of the basket. “Look, Dad! Everything down there looks like toys.”