Drowned Town by Jayne Moore Waldrop

Author:Jayne Moore Waldrop
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
Published: 2021-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

UNMOORED

Robert missed his annual checkup, and for six months Margaret was on him to reschedule. She wouldn’t have known he had skipped it—the doctor’s office always called him directly at his work or cell number—but this time, a polite woman called the house and asked Margaret to please remind him to get in touch. Margaret brought it up again as the morning coffee brewed.

“Why won’t you go?” she said as she came up from behind and slipped her arms around him. “You think I like putting my feet in the stirrups? Or having the girls smashed flat for a mammogram? No, I don’t, but I still go.”

He laughed and turned around to face her. “That sounds almost as bad as the gloved finger reaching way up there for my prostate,” he said, then kissed her and walked toward the kitchen door. “I have to get to work, but I’ll think about it.”

“If you won’t do it for yourself, do it for me,” she called out after him and headed upstairs to the master bathroom, still warm and steamy from his shower. A sweet, earthy waft of his shampoo and shaving gel hung in the humid air. She liked him to shower first. She got to breathe in his scent—the way he smelled still got her attention—plus she didn’t have to wait as long for hot water to reach the second floor from the basement. The house was old and quirky, like most others in the Louisville Highlands, but Margaret loved it.

When they had first looked at the house, Robert thought it was too big and too fancy for two people. Margaret thought it was perfect, and she convinced him they needed to buy it. Typical of the neighborhood, theirs was a tall and narrow brick Victorian, a solid urban version of late nineteenth-century architecture, an era when whiskey, tobacco, and horseracing interests ruled the city. Families with names like Brown and Speed built iconic homes, racetracks, distilleries, and warehouses that still stood as monuments to the barons of vice.

Margaret Starks and Robert McKinley moved to her hometown right after law school. She had grown up in the east end, a privileged only child of doctors. He was a first-generation college grad, the youngest boy in a large family from Clintwood in southwest Virginia, a small town where his ancestors had settled before the Civil War.

Their paths had been unlikely to cross until they converged in the first week of law school at the University of Virginia. She felt the attraction when she met him at a welcome party during orientation. He wore a pale yellow oxford cloth shirt, its long sleeves rolled up in the warm September sun. She noticed that his hair and eyes were nearly the same soft brown shade, but what she remembered was his countenance. His face looked open and unassuming, maybe even vulnerable, and that made him stand out in the crowd of eager, anxious law students. They talked to each other for a long time, and by the end of the night she hardly remembered meeting anyone else.

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