Still Life With Bread Crumbs by Anna Quindlen

Author:Anna Quindlen [Anna Quindlen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literature & Fiction, Genre Fiction, Family Saga, Literary, United States, Women's Fiction, Contemporary Women, Contemporary Fiction, Sagas, Literary Fiction
ISBN: 9780812995756
Amazon: B00EBRUAYE
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2014-03-10T16:00:00+00:00

SITTING IN A TREE, AGAIN

Three things happened at the beginning of December.

The building in which Rebecca lived in New York announced a maintenance increase of 10 percent to replace the roof. (1540)

The nursing home where her mother lived announced an adjustment in monthly charges based on higher costs of fuel oil and staff salaries. (2210)

She ran out of firewood.

Oddly enough, that last seemed the worst, or at least the most real. It reminded her of the time after she had been served with divorce papers and been told Peter wanted a swift resolution in time for a June wedding, his fiancée being four months pregnant—and was it actually semantically possible, she had wondered, to have a wife and a fiancée at the same time if you were not an adherent of one of the hinkier Mormon sects? It so happened that on her way to throw open her door to the dishy Latino process server, she had hit her foot on the stone obelisk which she used as a doorstop—and which, she realized later, she had purchased on her honeymoon, Peter saying, “That is precisely the sort of item that holds you up in customs”—and broken her toe. For a week afterward she had been obsessed with her toe, finding shoes that would not worry it, taping it with clear surgical tape, tracking the slow progression of its color, like a sunset in reverse, from black to purple to yellowy mauve. Her toe stopped her from thinking too much about her future. The firewood did the same for her finances.

She bought three cords of wood from a man who sold firewood from a truck at the side of the gas station; she knew it wouldn’t last long but she wasn’t carrying the cash for more, and the man had snorted when she asked if he accepted credit cards. When Jim Bates came to pick her up the Saturday morning after and saw the wood stacked by the front door, he all at once looked like the kind of guy you wouldn’t want to cross in a bar.

“You buy this from Kevin?” he said.

“I bought it at the filling station. Why?”

“Don’t buy any firewood. It’s lying all over these woods, just waiting to be split. I’ve got a log splitter. I can take care of it.”

“Kevin, Sarah’s husband?” she said.

“Yeah, never mind, I’ll take care of it,” he said, climbing into the cab of his truck.

The coffee was so sweet this morning that it tasted like melted coffee ice cream, but she needed the warmth up in the tree stand. Heat rises; maybe cold does, too. Rebecca leaned over the big thermos lid so that the steam wreathed her face. Her nose remained numb. Leaning back against the tree trunk, she could feel the bark even through the down parka, the sweater, the long underwear. The long underwear was her Christmas present to herself. The Greifers, the blessed Greifers, who were always first to buy her work, had decided to acquire one of the photographs of the stone wall, although not one of the bigger ones.

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