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

the smell was still there and she could smell it long after she’d left. With her foot on the gas she felt she was trying to outrun it, and her parents, and her fears for her future—what would happen to them, what would happen to her. She vowed to return only when she could return properly, to her own apartment and a more permanent work arrangement, whatever that might be. At night she found herself imagining managing a coffee shop, raising money for a hospital, anything with a regular paycheck. An office. She had never worked in a real office.
    By the time she arrived back at the house—she still didn’t call it home—she was like a wine bottle with nothing inside but a few grainy dregs, a woman who rarely wept although she knew she would have been better for it. The dog might have cheered her, or at least taken her mind off her father, her mother, the money. But perhaps she wouldn’t have noticed him properly, not tired and depleted as she was that evening. Perhaps she wouldn’t have noticed the way his black eyes shone from beneath his caterpillarbrows, the way his ears lifted when a deer sneezed somewhere out in the forest. Who knows how it all would have turned out if the dog hadn’t heard the cry from down below and answered it, hoping for food? Sometimes things have to come when you’re ready for them. Rebecca Winter knew that well, was about to learn it even better.

ENTER TAD, A BIG FAN
    One morning in September, just like that, there was an additional $380 in her account. It must have come from a permission to reprint one of her photographs, perhaps the combined royalties on the two books. It was an amount that would have seemed negligible years before but now felt like a windfall. It was a warm day, with a faint breeze, and suddenly everything seemed promising. She would spend some of the money at the grocery store, then make soup and stockpile it in the narrow freezer, narrowed further by the crusty ice on its walls. Maybe she would even defrost the freezer while she was making the soup.
    “That’s Tad,” Sarah whispered as she put a pumpkin scone in front of her at Tea for Two. “He’s a clown.”
    “I can see that,” Rebecca said.
    “No, like a real clown. A professional.”
    “I can see that.”
    Big black shoes with curling toes, a one-piece suit part polka dots, part stripes and stars. A curly red wig, ersatz Orphan Annie, with a hint of dark hair at the nape of the neck. And the obligatory white face paint and scarlet nose. Tad looked as though he was ready for work.
    “May I have six scones, Sarah?” he said. “Assorted?”
    “Anything to drink?”
    “No, thanks. Make it a dozen scones. Or, no, what about six scones, two black-and-white cookies, and two walnut Danish?”
    “I’m out of Danish.”
    “What about six scones, the black-and-white cookies, and some croissants?”
    Rebecca looked down at her computer screen, studying the cross photographs, trophy, yearbook, ribbon, birthday card. There were commonplace customs detailed in the local paper that she found strange and inexplicable: seasonal corn mazes, decorated stroller parades, clog dancing. In the beginning she had tried to convince herself that the crosses were a local tradition of some sort, but she couldn’t imagine what sort that might be. Perhaps if she saw Jim Bates she would ask him. Sarah said he knew everything.
    “Oh, maybe I’ll have a hot chocolate, too,” the clown said. “But no whipped cream. Or just a tad.”
    “A tad,” Sarah said. “Ha ha. I get it.”
    Rebecca tried not to look at Tad, which was difficult. It was like ignoring panhandlers on the subway: a clown commanded the eye. She had once been hired by a magazine to take pictures for a story on the vanishing circus. She had not been particularly happy with the results—too obvious, especially the acrobats in their spangled costumes and the clowns in their extravagant makeup, all dour and vacant-faced in repose. There had been some close-ups