Still Life With Bread Crumbs: A Novel Read online

  “Thank you,” Rebecca said.

  “I’m told you’ve left the city behind,” he added.

  “I’m living mainly in the country,” she said. Jim put his arm around her shoulder.

  “And this is …?” the editor said quizzically, swiveling.

  “Jim,” said Jim Bates.

  “And you are …?”

  “With Rebecca.”

  “I mean, you work as …?”

  “A roofer.”

  “A roofer?”

  “Do you own a house?”

  “An apartment.”

  “Never mind then,” Jim said. “Nice meeting you.”

  “You just blew off the editor of The New York Times Book Review,” Maddie said.

  “He didn’t look like an editor.”

  “What do you think editors look like?”

  “Taller,” said Jim Bates, taking another shrimp from a passing tray.

  STILL LIFE WITH TIN ROOF

  Rebecca wasn’t sure exactly when she first started to think about buying the place. She thought maybe it was when she had been in Pittsburgh, which it turned out was only five hours across the interstate from Jim Bates’s place if you made the drive late at night, knew where the speed traps were, and let it rip on the straightaways. The university had put her in the lovely little Craftsman-style house she’d chosen from photographs, and there were things about it that made her realize what she could do to the cottage, how she could make it homey and comfortable. “Yeah, yeah, this is nice,” Jim had said, walking around the screened porch and the small oak-paneled library with his hands deep in his pockets, his head swiveling side to side, up and down.

  Or maybe it was when the second year of her lease was up and the architect who owned the cottage tried to increase her rent. From reading the papers he probably knew that she had money now. There had been a good deal written about the White Cross photographs, and the dog book, and there had been a resurgence of interest in her work because of it. There had even been a small item in the Home section when her father’s desk sold so high at auction. She still checked her bank balance every day, but not with the same sense of terror. The caution, however, would never go away.

  “He’s jacking you up,” Jim said, stacking wood by the door.

  “What if I tried to buy the place?”

  “That works for me,” Jim said with a grin.

  The architect said he didn’t want to sell, that the place had too many memories, that it was a big part of his past. Rebecca knew exactly how he felt; she felt exactly the same way about her apartment in New York, which was how she knew that he would come around eventually. And he did.

  “That’s a ridiculous price for this place,” Jim Bates said, but he was as pink and glowing as a spring sunset, and Rebecca knew that he was happy. Sometimes he came through the door and it was still a nice surprise, like unwrapping a present.

  “I suspect he’ll come down,” she said. And she was right about that, too. The funny thing was, she never even met him. His lawyer handled the sale, and when Rebecca offered to let the architect come for lunch and take one last look at the place and remove his keepsakes, he sighed and said it was just as well not to revisit the past.

  Inside a locked closet was an old set of Mikasa dishes in a faux Japanese pattern, a box of what appeared to be college history course notes, a photo album with only two photos, both of the house, and some fairly unimaginative gay pornography. Rebecca made a bonfire and burned it all except the Mikasa, which for some reason she decided to use.

  That April three bulldozers arrived to break ground on the foundation for a new house, glass and cedar and steel beams, a big open space on the first floor and three bedrooms behind. There was going to be an underground propane tank so Rebecca could have a gas stove in the kitchen. Jim had suggested a tin roof.

  “It’s good-looking, not so expensive, and it makes a nice noise when it rains. But it’s your house, your call.”

  “I think a tin roof would be so nice,” said Maddie, who had a secret she was bursting to tell but couldn’t, not yet, but that made her think almost everything would be so nice.

  “You could use a new roof on the old place, too,” Jim said.

  “That’s where they’re gonna put us, babe, in the old place,” Ben said. It was funny, how wary Ben was with Jim. He had never been wary of his father’s wives, but maybe that was because he knew they were transient, and unimportant. He could tell Jim Bates was neither of those things. Plus he was handier with tools than Ben was. “He’s too damn young for her,” he sometimes told Maddie.

  “Oh, stop,” Maddie always said.

  “The old place is going to be nice,” said Jim.

  “I intend to use it as my studio,” Rebecca said.

  And that was exactly what happened, after Jim’s friends in construction put in some big windows and tore out some walls to let in the light. Rebecca wanted to keep the bedroom, though. She had a soft spot for that bedroom. In the years to come her grandson, Oliver, would sleep in that bedroom and feel very grown-up because the real grown-ups were in the big house and he was there, alone. Although he didn’t sleep much on those nights because there were so many sounds, scrabbling in the trees, creaking from above, the lowing of a train whistle. He liked staying there better when Alice stayed there, too, and she did sometimes, to give her parents some breathing room.

  But that was later.

  When Rebecca looked at the map before she bought the house, she realized that she was acquiring a big tract of land. Sometimes she and Jim walked it, working out the property lines. Not far from the tree in which Jim’s tree stand still stood was a rock outcropping. From the front it looked solid, nature’s idea of a dry wall, but for a long time there was an opening on one side, although most of the time ferns masked it.

  It was uncanny, how large the cave behind that opening was once you got inside. A man as big as Jim Bates would have to stoop, but a small woman could stand within it. Even with her arms out she could not touch both walls.

  Inside the cave there were two white crosses standing against one wall. Beside them were a box of Sheetrock nails and an old hammer crusted with rust. There was also a navy blue sleeping bag with a plaid lining, a worn Bible with a curling leather cover, and a framed photograph of a girl in a long dress, blue with a deep ruffle around the neck and shoulders. A young man in a military uniform stood next to her. The girl’s hair was dirty blond, but the young man was very fair. A lacy pattern of dark mold had obscured the picture but still his hair shone through.

  One year in December a bear found the mouth of the cave. She slept at the deepest end through the winter, and as she turned, half-conscious, she ground the crosses into pieces, then splinters, then dust. Her cubs were born atop the sleeping bag.

  When the three bears left the cave all that remained was scraps of fabric, some pieces of silvery metal that had once been a picture frame, and a few pale spars of wood. That spring the cave collapsed. A poplar fell, its roots were upended, they tore away part of the roof of the cave, the rains came in, and so on, and so forth. Then there was nothing except some fragments in the ground, forever and ever.

  It was in the nature of things that this happened, and it was in the nature of things that one day, after the new house was built, and Ben and Maddie had had Oliver, and Sarah and the other Jim had had a baby sister for Alice, Jim and Rebecca found themselves standing atop the mound that remained where the cave had once been. It was in the nature of things that he turned to her, put his arms around her, and let one hand drop to her behind. His hairline had receded a little, and he had a big scar on his forearm where he’d sliced himself against the end of the tin roof and needed twelve stitches. She’d been so upset, the blood, the hospital, but he’d said, “Calm down. Worse things have happened.”

  “There’s a chicken dinner tonight at the firehouse,” he said as they stood in the forest.

  “The last time we went to that dinner the woman who runs it looked at me
strangely. And I’ve already defrosted the salmon.”

  “Well, then, that settles it.”

  “It will keep until tomorrow if you prefer chicken,” Rebecca said, and the dog lifted his ears. He was getting older, but his hearing was still good. He knew these words: walk, out, down, off, Jim, Jack, Ben, Oliver, chicken, steak, bacon, and bone. Because of the book, he was a little famous, and the vet kept an autographed picture of him in his waiting room.

  “Check it out,” Jim said softly, and a line of turkeys ran across the deer trail in front of them, two large ungainly birds and a clutch of smaller ones.

  “Turkeys are dumb,” Jim Bates said.

  “You always say that,” Rebecca said.

  “It’s true.”

  “I’m sure you’re right,” she said, and put her arm through his and pressed it to her side.

  “Let’s stay home and eat salmon,” he said.

  “Perfect,” she replied.

  For all the teachers who helped make my work possible—and for my favorite teacher, Theresa Quindlen

  BY ANNA QUINDLEN

  FICTION

  Still Life with Bread Crumbs

  Every Last One

  Rise and Shine

  Blessings

  Black and Blue

  One True Thing

  Object Lessons

  NONFICTION

  Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake

  Good Dog. Stay

  Being Perfect

  Loud and Clear

  A Short Guide to a Happy Life

  How Reading Changed My Life

  Thinking Out Loud

  Living Out Loud

  BOOKS FOR CHILDREN

  Happily Ever After

  The Tree That Came to Stay

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ANNA QUINDLEN is a novelist and journalist whose work has appeared on fiction, nonfiction, and self-help bestseller lists. She is the author of seven novels: Object Lessons, One True Thing, Black and Blue, Blessings, Rise and Shine, Every Last One, and Still Life with Bread Crumbs. Her memoir Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake, published in 2012, was a number one New York Times bestseller. Her book A Short Guide to a Happy Life has sold more than a million copies. While a columnist at The New York Times she won the Pulitzer Prize and published two collections, Living Out Loud and Thinking Out Loud. Her Newsweek columns were collected in Loud and Clear.

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