“Trout would have laughed at me from heaven.” She drops the box on the table.
“You believe in heaven?”
“No.”
“So? What do you think happens?”
“I think nothing happens. Is Sadler here?”
“Mr. Sadler has business in Spokane.”
“It’s time for me to start flying over the line. I know where the landing strips are. I’ve practiced on them. Without Trout, I’m the only one who can do it.”
He leans against the sink and lights a cigarette. “That’s not true. The country’s lousy with pilots.”
“It was my condition from the beginning. You know it was.”
“Marian, I never agreed to your so-called condition.”
She gapes at him. “You did. You let me keep taking lessons.”
“You can’t assume you have a deal with someone just because you issue a decree.”
“I said I didn’t want lessons unless I knew I had a way to work off what I owe you. It’s not fair otherwise.”
Amused: “Not fair you should have what you most wanted?”
“Not fair you won’t give me a way to pay you back.”
“Isn’t it a little unseemly to try to leverage Trout’s death into a flying opportunity the very day of his funeral?”
“His number came up,” she says, defiant. “He always said it could.”
He smokes, watching her. “Are you really this hard?”
“Trout would have said I was ready. I know the mountains. You know you can trust me. If not this, then let me drive for you. Let me do something. I’ll go back to collecting bottles. Anything. I feel like some rich man’s daughter, or like I’ve been taught to fly just because it’s funny to see a girl in an airplane, like a dog walking on its hind legs.”
A long silence. He offers his gaze as a kind of challenge; she holds it. Finally, he says, “I don’t think of you as a daughter, or a dog.” He shifts, stubs out his cigarette in an ashtray. “But the biplane can’t hold much cargo anyway. I don’t think it’s worth the risk.”
Like that, without fanfare, the charade is over. “It holds thirty cases,” she says. “Maybe a few more. Trout told me. That’s not nothing if it’s premium brands. And you’d keep your air routes open in case you wanted to get a bigger plane again.”
“It’s not enough to justify putting you on the wrong side of the law.”
“I’ve been on the wrong side of the law for years,” she says, feeling blustering, silly.
“But not on my account.” She tries to interrupt; he cuts her off. “Just this one little time, Marian, I won’t give you what you want. Not right now.”
“But soon?”
Hesitantly, he rests one hand on her shoulder, squeezes gently, as though testing fruit. “If a pilot with Trout’s experience died, how can you know it won’t happen to you?”
“I can’t, but I have to do it anyway.”
“If anything were to happen to you, I would never forgive myself.”
“It wouldn’t be your fault.” She steps so close her left foot is between his feet. “Let me jump the line. Please.”
He seems almost as though he will agree but recovers himself, moves away. “Don’t do that.”
“Do what?”
“Don’t offer yourself.”
“You’re the one trying to buy me.”
“I’m not trying to buy you, I’m trying to help you.”
“Then help me by letting me be useful.” She storms off, out the door. He doesn’t follow.
That night in the cottage with Caleb, she does what she has not done before: She fucks him. She has never before associated that word with what they do, but now it fills her head. She sits atop him, furious, gouging with her hips.
At first he responds in kind but then turns passive and watchful. At the end, he pushes her off, comes into an old washing flannel. She has struck the wall—not hard—but she shouts at him. He covers her mouth with a hand, and she bites. Part of her wishes he would slug her like he did when they were kids, but even as he yanks his hand back, grimacing in pain, she knows he won’t. Instead, he pulls her roughly to his chest, holds tight until she quits fighting. She thinks he is waiting for her to cry. She will not. She can’t. Eventually, they fall asleep.
At dawn, after he has dressed, he sits on the edge of the bed, his hair loose down his back. “We have to stop this,” he says. “Whatever you have with him, you have to sort it out. I can’t help you with it.”