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

that the cross and the trophy were gone. For some reason it made her angry, not just for the sake of her photographs—although she had to admit that that was part of it, she’d thought of doing a progression as the cross weathered and the foliage changed—but because someone had put the things there together, intentionally, and someone had taken them away.
    She went back to the other cross, put down her camera on a flat rock, and circled the area, squinting at the ground. A yearbook often had the owner’s name embossed on the cover in gold leaf, but this one didn’t. The two pieces of the cross were held together with a short nail, and the centering wasn’t exact, so that one side of the crossbar extended farther than the other. The first time she’d just taken the photographs, but now she studied the tableau. It was a bit like one of those roadside shrines that appeared along the interstate when some teenager—it was always a teenager—crashed his car into a tree and died behind the wheel. But those crosses were always annotated—name, date—and surrounded by tributes, flowers, stuffed animals. This felt different.
    She picked up her camera, took a few more photographs, then hiked up the side of the butte to see if there was any point in shooting it from above. The vegetation hid the yearbook from view, and so she kept climbing, her pack heavy, a damp spotspreading at the center of her spine. When she brushed her hair back with her hand it was as warm as tin. The slope was getting steeper, and she had to push hard to continue.
    She found herself doing math in her mind, the math she did almost every day. Fifty-eight hundred for subletting the apartment, minus 1000 for renting the cottage; 1400 for the maintenance on the apartment, 1900 for her part of the nursing home charges, 1000 for her father’s rent at the apartment near the nursing home. It left 500 a month to live on no matter how, or how often, she added it up. She hoped the old tires on her car held out. She hoped none of her cameras needed repair. She hoped she could produce some new work, some good work, that her work would come back into fashion and start to sell. “Look at Jane Ann Bettison,” Dorothea had said when she told her she was subletting her apartment. “She was huge, then nothing, then suddenly the secondary market went crazy and she was huge again.”
    “Jane Ann Bettison died last year.”
    “Granted, but she was flush when she died.”
    Rebecca leveled off on the crest of the mountain, or at least the first crest. All through July she had vowed to reach the top, but it was like a mirage, or solvency, always much farther away than it looked. She peered through a break in the trees but there was more and more mountain, ever upward. Overhead she saw movement, and a bald eagle bisected the patch of sky. The shock of recognition was powerful; he looked exactly like money. He banked slightly and from inside a huge maple ahead she saw a gun pointed at him and she broke into a run, her backpack bumping between her shoulder blades.
    “What are you doing?” she shouted as the bird wheeled and disappeared. “What do you think you’re doing?”
    “Ah, hell,” said a voice from deep within the branches of the tree.
    She looked up, saw the soles of hiking boots over the edge ofa platform above her and then a flushed truculent face. “Jim Bates,” she said aloud.
    “Ms. Winter,” he said, making the
s
in the term of address sound like a bee buzzing, more Southern manners than political correctness.
    “I’ve always understood it’s illegal to shoot a bald eagle,” she said. “If it’s not it certainly should be.”
    He shimmied down the tree trunk, the big gun held on a bandolier strap that cut across his chest. Beneath it a T-shirt the green of midsummer leaves had the letters SWS on its front. Under his arms the green was the darker shade of the deeper forest. He shook her hand formally but the line of his mouth was