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

couch, the one with a pillow that smelled of coconut oil and perspiration. He didn’t ask much because he’d been accustomed to getting very little, and he’d learned not to commit until he was clear on the conditions. Which was why he’d followed a series of faint scents—warm human, toasted bread, ripe cheese, bird droppings, deer droppings, bear droppings—up the hill to the cottage. It happened that his nose was several thousand times sharper than that of a human, which had made living downwind of a meth kitchen torture even before the cold came. He could pick up the faint lingering aroma of the long-dead raccoon and even a hint of gun residue that made him skittish. Thesmell that calmed him but that he couldn’t name was the smell of warm peaches in a bowl on the table mingled with a leftover scone.
    Rebecca would have told you she was not a dog person, although if she had told that to anyone in town, except for the city couples who came only on weekends, they would not have known what she meant. Having a dog in the country didn’t require much of an investment, financial or emotional: a clothesline, a twenty-pound bag of no-name food, a doghouse elevated enough so that not too much snow got inside. The locals were pragmatic about their animals in a way the city people found callous. Some couple from Tribeca would be sitting in the animal clinic waiting room with a feral cat they intended to take home after it was dewormed, declawed, vaccinated, and neutered—after it was purged of much of its essential catness—and the vet tech would come out and say to the man slumped across from them, zipping and unzipping an old waxed jacket, “Mr. Jensen, Rufus broke that leg in two places and it’s going to be upwards of six hundred dollars to fix it.” And Mr. Jensen would turn his wool cap in his hands and think about the gutters, the gas prices, and the lack of seasonal work and say sadly, “I guess you’ll just have to put him down.” Some of the country people took the dog home and put him down themselves, coming up behind with a .22. It was cheaper than the injection. Then they went to the shelter and got another dog. Often they gave it the same name as the old one, just to make things simpler.
    It was different in the city, which was why Rebecca didn’t think of herself as a dog person. Growing up in a building with lots of older people, she had known two sorts of women: the ones whose faces folded in upon themselves at the sight of a dog, particularly in the lobby, who fought to have dogs consigned to the service elevator, who pressed into a corner or wouldn’t get onto the elevator with one, particularly those Alsatians, terrifying. And then there were the ones who had dogs and were,frankly, nuts. They dressed their dogs in plaid coats, talked to them in high-pitched baby talk, referred to themselves as Ginger’s or Poppy’s mommy. The woman in the apartment next to her parents had a line of brass urns on the living room mantel, each containing the ashes of a Pekingese. After she died and her children emptied the apartment they were still there and the super put them in a box and then in the dumpster.
    Even when Rebecca had a son, who in the manner of children the world over asked for a pet incessantly,
I’ll take care of it, I will, please please please
, circumstances dictated that Rebecca would not have a dog because Peter was allergic. When she visited England the first time with him she realized that this was so aberrational there as to be shameful, and that Peter’s father had dealt with it by always having a pair of buff-colored Labradors and telling his son that he simply needed to get on with it. In this way Peter had gotten the nickname Wheezy at school; this, too, she discovered on that trip, when virtually all his old friends called him by that name. It made her look at him in a different way and be very solicitous for a time, until finally on the train back to London he had said, “Is