Still Life With Bread Crumbs: A Novel Read Free Page A

the next morning, looking out over the water towers of the west side from her kitchen window, and determined that if she rented out her apartment at the accepted exorbitant New York rate, she could afford the cottage, pay the fees for her mother’s nursing home, manage the premiums for her own health insurance, put something into her retirement account, help with her father’s rent, give a hand to her son, Ben, when he was short, and still put away some money each month for the surprises and emergencies that always seemed to arise. When she was young she’d been able to live on almost nothing; now so many people depended upon her, so many bills appeared each month. Car insurance, life insurance, homeowner’s insurance. And living in the cottage would provide inspiration, she thought. A change of scene always brought inspiration, people said. Everyone was waiting.

NOT INSPIRING
    “Rebecca Winter,” the woman breathed, her face pinking up the way a baby’s did at birth. It was like a prayer, like a sigh, like old times. “It’s an honor,” she added. She put her hands out to take Rebecca’s. She had the kind of soft hands that are always warm and just a little moist, that look like a baby’s hands, with dimples at the knuckles. She had dimples in her cheeks and chin, too. For a passing moment Rebecca wondered if she had dimples everywhere.
    Then the woman added, “My mother had your poster on our refrigerator,” and ruined it. For a moment Rebecca had been forty. Now she is sixty again. No, she is a hundred. She is a prisoner in the amber of her own past. “The artist formerly known as Rebecca Winter,” her son, Ben, had once said, apropos of something she can’t remember, and when he had seen her face he had hastily added, “A joke, a joke, a really bad joke.”
    She needed to reclaim the basic syntax of her daily existence, upended in this strange little town. Each morning in the city she had done a half hour on the elliptical machine in her building’s gym while watching the news on a flat screen overhead. Here, when she had asked the man at the gas station about a gym he had directed her to what she realized was the local high school. As a substitute she has decided to walk, but there are no sidewalks and the first morning a truck had come around a curve, fast, veering away to avoid sideswiping her, the driver’s middle finger a small stanchion in the rear window as he screeched away in a plume of exhaust fumes. Minutes later a woman with a tight white perm, a halo of hair, had pulled up next to her and rolled down her window. “You need a lift?” she’d asked. If you walked on these roads, everyone thought your car had broken down.
    The dimpled woman had greeted her inside the closest thing to a coffee bar in town. Rebecca was amazed to find even this amid the hair salon (Cut and Perm, $20 on Wednesday, and she’d shuddered), the hardware store, the insurance/travel/accounting agency office, the secondhand furniture place that always seemed closed. The director of the arts program in Wilmington or Asheville, she couldn’t remember which, had made a comment once when he was driving her to a lecture about how all of America looked alike now, but he’d been glaring at a gaudy stretch of Staples, IHOP, Piggly Wiggly, and Home Depot. This part of America looked alike, too, the tired tattered Main Streets where the old bank building had been turned into a restaurant that failed, where the aspirational businesses, the dress shops and bookstores, were doomed before they’d even opened. And yet here stood a place called Tea for Two (Or More), with a cheery little anthropomorphized teapot on the sign, smiling, waving with its handle, breathing steam through its curly spout. Rebecca would have counseled against the parenthetical phrase. Apparently that was the common reaction, since the woman addressedit almost at once, at length. Sarah Ashby, proprietor. That’s what it said at the bottom of the