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

there any particular reason you’ve chosen this moment to behave as though I am terminally ill?” Kindness only made Peter harsh.
    Of course by the time Ben was six Peter was off to the next woman, the new family, but somehow the dog issue had soon vanished for her son, replaced by demands for video games and computer equipment. On a bitter winter morning Rebecca was happy to sit at the table with a cup of coffee and the newspapers and not have to gird herself with boots and scarves to pull a recalcitrant terrier along the curb and remove her gloves to stoop and pick up after him with a plastic bag.
    No one had ever picked up after this dog. It could be argued that it was the other way around, that he cleaned up the messes of people, that when the old man spilled milk down the sides of the kitchen cabinets or dropped cereal on the floor, or when thewoman in the white house let the garbage get away from her and slide from the can, he had cleaned up after them. His were transactional relationships; he gave as good as he got, maybe better. Maybe much better. It had been a bad couple of weeks in the little white house, and his haunches jutted sharply from the sandy fur above his tail, his midsection a big concave bowl when he preferred it with a little heft.
    “Jack!” a voice called from below, and the dog’s ears rose into sharp triangles. “Jack, come. Come.” That’s what he was called, at least for now. He took his time going down a deer trail, raising his leg against a spindly pine where a fox had done the same thing the day before. He raised his nose to the sky, thought he smelled an open can of cat food. This one bought cat food as often as she bought dog food, but he didn’t care as long as there was food, and the heat in the house worked.
    In a way it was too bad that he’d vanished by the time Rebecca pulled her car into the gravel place to one side of the cottage. She could have used the distraction. “I will see you again soon,” she had said to the attendant at the nursing home, and “I hope so,” the woman had replied, but they both knew it wasn’t true. Rebecca had noticed that her intention to visit her parents was in direct proportion to her distance from them in both time and space. The pink of her mother’s scalp through the flossy white hair, the box of adult diapers in her father’s bathroom. And the fear that someday she herself would be slumped in a plastic chair, lifting a calculator or an old cellphone to her face, an imaginary camera.
    “She thinks she’s a photographer, that one,” an aide would say, calling her honey or dear or sweetheart that way they did that was supposed to be nice but wasn’t. Or maybe if she was very lucky, one of them would say, “Somebody told me she used to be a famous photographer.” There was a Filipino woman who did occupational therapy at the Jewish Home and whom she’d heard whispering about her mother, “Very famous concertpianist.” She wanted to tell her not to whisper. Bebe would be thrilled if such a remark penetrated her conscious mind.
    Rebecca got out of the car with the peculiar empty feeling that she often had instead of sadness, as though her body knew that it was better to feel nothing at all rather than the something her mother’s playing and her father’s jollity and her fading bank balance evoked. She was ashamed, too, because all she could think of was having a long shower standing in the stained tub, washing off the smell she always felt crept into her clothes and her hair during these trips, the sweetish smell of old people, a combination of clothes that needed washing and some attar of starchy food and medicinal ointments. In the nursing home it was overlaid with the smell of disinfectant and it was almost blotted out in her father’s apartment by Sonya’s sponge baths—the specifics of which she didn’t like to think about too much—and one of those laundry detergents with a name like Mountain Spring or Autumn Rain. But