Still Life With Bread Crumbs: A Novel by Anna Quindlen Read Free Book Online

through the bandage. He started down the slope of the mountain a little too fast, his boot heels sliding from time to time in the damp moss. “Ah, hell,” he repeated, “ah, hell,” so that finally it sounded like one word, like a sound of discovery and distress, like an animal call.

SO HERE’S THE DEAL
    The photographs of the stone wall were good. Rebecca suspected that they might be better in color; the stones were pale gray, nearly black, rust-colored, brown with veins of ocher, a tumble of muted and complementary shades. But Rebecca didn’t work in color. Once she had given in to market pressure and hand-tinted a series of photographs of Ben’s action figures. Lavender soldiers, apple-green robots, a wizard with a pale orange robe. They weren’t bright colors, more like a faint watercolor wash, and they had all sold the night of the show. People liked color. Rebecca found it distracting and never used it again.
    All her clothes were black and gray and white. One of the most painful memories of her childhood involved the bar mitzvah of the son of a business associate of her father, and a screaming pink dress from B. Altman her mother had purchased twosizes bigger than Rebecca wore so that she would get plenty of use from it. Her mother was certain Rebecca had gotten a grease stain from a piece of chicken Kiev on the skirt so she would never have to wear it again. For once, her mother was right.
    The photographs of the stone wall were promising, but it was the photograph of the cross that she looked at again and again, that she put up on the wall of the back bedroom so that when she looked up there it was. The walls were rough cedar shakes, pocked and splintered, so damaged they were impervious to more, so she’d put the rough copy of one of the photographs up with pushpins. There was something about it—the simple strong graphic of the white cross, the pathos of the triumphant athlete holding a ball aloft and yet askew.
    She was sure it was good, and then she wasn’t. Once a day she checked her bank balance, and she wasn’t certain if the photograph was really good or she just hoped it was because she needed the money so much. She’d been offered a visiting artist’s post at an art school in Savannah several years before, and she’d barely bothered to think about it. Now she sent TG a message to see if they had filled it for the next year. “Bad economy no gig,” TG had had her assistant respond. Even TG’s hostile aphorisms had been downgraded, in her case, to minion delivery.
    The bill from the nursing home was due. Rebecca moved it to the corner of the dining table, which she was using as a desk. She had found a smooth oval stone to use as a paperweight, and she put it on the bill, which sat atop other bills. She wondered how long she could continue to pay them, with no money coming in. She wondered if she should contact a real estate agent in the city about selling her apartment. She left the cottage.
    The second cross was set into a swale of what looked like wheat at the point where the forest thinned on a butte overlooking a winding road below. Rebecca had to angle herself because the blue leather-bound book propped up at the foot of the cross was surrounded by a feathery corona of yellowish grasses. Itspages were flat; it must have been put there recently or the dew would have begun to disfigure it. The sun caught the gold embossed seal in one corner. “Central Valley High School,” it said. This time the “RIP” was clearer, pen instead of pencil. Rebecca took some shots, backed up, took some at a distance, came in close again. She suddenly thought that the original cross, the one with the trophy, might look different now, perhaps more weathered, and she tried to find her way back to the clearing where she’d seen it. She was pretty sure she had found the right place, but nothing was there. She hiked for another thirty minutes, circling back, but the more she looked the more she was certain