Love in a Dry Season by Shelby Foote

Author:Shelby Foote [Foote, Shelby]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780307779250
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-04-06T04:30:00+00:00

It was not so simple for Drew, shoved as he was into the night without even his hat, his overcoat clutched in his arms: a cold night, too, though just as a hand removed from a basin of hot water and plunged without delay into a basin of ice water will not register the change until after a certain lapse, he did not realize this until his blood began to cool. Also there was the problem of starting the car: Jeff would hear it. But that was all right; Briartree’s drive sloped down to the lakeside road and his car was already headed in that direction. Careful not to slam the door, he got in, turned the ignition on, pulled the choke half out, and disengaged the clutch. Near the gate he let the clutch in and the engine sputtered and caught. Then it died. “I’m damned,” he said. But that was all right, too; he was out on the road by then and it might have been any passing vehicle with an engine failure.

After such delays and problems he settled down for the thirty-mile ride to Bristol, hatless with his overcoat collar turned high about his ears, remembering the taste and texture of her kiss, the scratch of her nails against the silk at his back, the small whimpering sound she made after the shock of contact: Man, she was ready, he told himself with elation. It was in his memory now and always would be, that first clench; he drew a certain satisfaction from knowing it was available to him, waiting to be summoned up for warmth the rest of his life on cold and lonely stretches such as this. He even grew philosophical about it, drawing on the experience to deduce broad laws of behavior, attractive because they were at once paradoxical and optimistic. For he had plotted and planned for this from the outset, from the first day he saw her on the links, scuffing about in forty-dollar shoes with the same loose-jointed indolence as the teen age waitresses and shopgirls (whom he also found attractive) in two-dollar ‘loafers’ with pennies in the flaps. He stopped in his tracks at that first sight of her: Man, thats for me, he had thought. And now she was.

Yet the strange thing was—and here was where he waxed philosophical, striking a paradox—it had come after he had despaired, had given up. Immediately after that first sight of her, now almost eight years ago, she and her husband had gone to Carolina for their inheritance, then to Europe for the five-year celebration. He had met them when they returned, the night Huey Long got his, and at first he had been dismayed at her reaction; he was not accustomed to being disliked. But then, though without much satisfaction, he had told himself it was better than indifference—he could wait; waiting was one of his specialties. Meanwhile he had cultivated the husband, at the cost of no little displeasure and some

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