Still Life with Bread Crumbs (26 page)

He lived in a small, very neat apartment on the first floor of a building in Brooklyn with a nasty Burmese cat who sang along as he did, and he kept an herb garden that he shared with his neighbors, who also loved the balloon animals he created for their children’s parties. He had even fixed up a young woman living down the block with one of the cooks at the restaurant.

He often thought that he should have moved to New York City years before, and when he went to visit his aunt and his
mother he always brought Rebecca either a bottle of olive oil or one of balsamic vinegar. His mother resented Rebecca’s influence on her son deeply, mistakenly believing that she had spent months convincing Tad to move to New York. “She tore this family apart,” Tad’s mother said sometimes. Her sister, Tad’s aunt, considered her confrontation with Rebecca in Walmart one of the bravest acts of her life, although Rebecca still didn’t know what that had been all about.

Kevin Ashby was found dead, crushed beneath a big tree. There was a chain saw near his body, and it was the common belief at Ralph’s that he was trying to cut down the tree for firewood—someone else’s tree, someone always interjected, to sell the firewood at some inflated price—and didn’t know what the hell he was doing. In a halfhearted way the state police investigated, but it was just the kind of accident that happened from time to time, like a lightning strike or an ATV crash.

Sarah cried uncontrollably for months, but only in the kitchen because Jim Bates told her kindly that it was going to really hurt her business if she did it in front of the customers.

“I can’t say I’m sorry,” he told Rebecca after they went to the funeral, which was poorly attended. “The guy was pond scum. I remember one night he tried to steal the money from the strongbox at her shop.”

“Are you certain it was him?”

“The cops caught him. He said he left some stuff inside, which you know is bull because he never went into the place except occasionally to take a couple of rolls or whatever. He messed up the security code, couldn’t remember the last two digits. And the security code was Sarah’s birthday. So. There you go.”

A year after Kevin Ashby’s death Sarah adopted a baby girl from Guatemala, whom she named Alice after Alice in Wonderland, and who she took to the family practice clinic on the same cul-de-sac as the vet’s office. The nurse practitioner who examined Alice was a man named, of all things, Jim. He sometimes
wore a T-shirt that said,
IF YOU THINK A MALE NURSE IS FUNNY, WAIT UNTIL YOU SEE MY TETANUS SHOT.
But he didn’t wear it to work because he was afraid it would frighten the children old enough to read and to need a tetanus shot. He was wearing it when he came in to buy miniquiche at Tea for Two, where also he took a quick look at a rash Alice had developed in the creases of her little elbows, which he said was nothing.

“What a nice man,” said Rebecca, who had been there having coffee with the editor who was publishing her book of dog photographs.

“He’s so not my type,” Sarah replied, and it was all Rebecca could do not to say two things:

Nevertheless Sarah began dating Jim, who everyone called the other Jim, about which he was good-humored since he liked the original Jim, who had taught him how to hunt. Or, as the other Jim liked to say, he was dating Sarah and Alice. Sarah still said he wasn’t her type, but she sang all the time in the kitchen while she cooked. “You make me feel like a natural woman,” she would bellow.

“She has a terrible voice,” Jim Bates said.

“Leave her be,” Rebecca said.

Dorothea liked visiting town so much that she bought a little place about ten minutes away, with a big brick fireplace in the living room and what would turn out to be a failing septic system. A month after she got back from Venice—“if I never see murky water again, it will be too soon,” she told Jim Bates when he asked how it was—she and Rebecca went to dinner together at Mario’s Ranchero because Jim was playing baseball with the volunteer fire department.

“That damn poster is on the wall,” Dorothea said.

Rebecca shrugged. “They make a great lasagna.”

“You look fantastic. Have you had work done?”

“No.”

“It’s that man.”

“It is.”

“How old is he?”

“Old enough,” Rebecca said.

“It’s the sex.”

“I’m happy.”

“It’s about time,” Dorothea said. “How the hell did you wind up with this guy?”

“I don’t know,” Rebecca said, her mouth full of guacamole. She thought for a moment. “And I don’t care.”

“What the hell has happened to you?”

“I don’t know. And I don’t care.”

“I’m jealous,” Dorothea said.

Afterward Dorothea would say that that was the beginning of her determination to buy a house nearby. That, and Mario’s empanadas.

Rebecca’s mother had a stroke and could play with only one hand. It seemed to make no difference. The nurses’ aides at the home said she would live to be a hundred. They were right.

Ben made a small indie film that won a festival prize. Rebecca was terribly worried that he and Maddie would move to Los Angeles.

“No way,” Maddie said at the book party for Rebecca’s book of dog photographs. “How could you think so little of me?”

The book was called
An Accidental Dog.
The book party was at the animal shelter at 125th Street. “God save me from dog books,” the editor of
The New York Times Book Review
told Rebecca. “But a dog book by Rebecca Winter? That’s something else entirely.”

“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.

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.