Still Life With Bread Crumbs: A Novel by Anna Quindlen

camera. The Cooper’s hawk had an intricate geometric pattern to its dusky feathers, and in the photographs you could see it perfectly. Once again she had the odd sense that she had been missing something, seeing the world flat when everything was rounded. Sitting quietly in the tree stand, she wondered if that was what moved her about the cross photographs, that the crosses themselves and the suggestion of the person who’d placed them were more than images, more like a story. Maybe that was what people had seen in the Kitchen Counter series, a story. But it was their story, not her own.
    A big bird Jim thought was an osprey passed overhead, but there was no warning and neither of them got a clear shot. They shared some scones and a thermos of coffee. It was the first time she had had coffee with sugar since college. It was the first time she understood how the people who now lived around her seemed to feel about their surroundings. From up in the tree stand she felt as if she owned all of this, the land, the trees, the big stones caressed by the water of the stream, the birds, the deer, the squirrels, the chipmunks. You were just far enough above it to feel as though you held sway. Up in a plane you felt as though you weren’t even part of the land, the small commas of blue swimming pool, the big rectangles of cornfield, the flat Monopoly board vistas of housing developments. On the ground you felt like nothing, like just another bit of it all. But up here, you felt like you were in it, like you owned it even if you had no idea who did.
    “Who owns this land?” she asked.
    “The water company,” Jim said.
    A couple hours in he put his hand over his heart and took out a cellphone. He peered at the screen, then muttered, “Sorry,” and turned his back. It was like being in an airplane before takeoff and pretending not to hear the phone conversation of thepassenger in the next seat. “That’s because you leave the windows open,” he said at one juncture, and later, “I can’t get down there right now, but I’ll get there before dinner and take care of it. Just close the bathroom door. He’s more afraid of you than you are of him.”
    “Your wife?” Rebecca said after he hung up.
    “My sister. I’m not married. Not anymore. You?”
    “If I were married it would be a little peculiar if I were living here by myself.”
    “My father used to say the world is full of peculiar,” he said. “I think we’ll call it a day.”
    “I’ve only got good photographs of two birds,” she said.
    “They’re paying you by the day, not by the bird,” he said.
    Getting down was, in some fashion, more difficult than getting up. She sat on the last branch, looking at the ground below. It reminded her of swimming from the boat to the beach, but in reverse: the beach always looked closer than it really was, while here she was certain it could not be as far down as it appeared.
    “Just drop,” he said, and he caught her and lowered her to the ground.
    “You could use some venison,” he said, walking away into the forest while she pulled her shirt straight and pushed her hair behind her ears. “Or a grilled cheese sandwich. I make a good grilled cheese sandwich.”

A GOOD GRILLED CHEESE SANDWICH
    “I make a good grilled cheese sandwich,” Jim Bates said again an hour later, Rebecca sitting a little uneasily in his tidy kitchen, with its gold cabinets and flowered wallpaper and pale yellow Formica, a kitchen frozen in 1967. As was Jim Bates’s grilled cheese sandwich:
    Take two slices of Wonder bread.
    Spread each with a lot of butter.
    Put three slices of Velveeta between them.
    Cook in a frying pan on both sides until brown and oozing.
    “No wonder,” she said.
    “What’s that supposed to mean?”
    “Two tablespoons of butter?”
    “You don’t want it to stick to the pan.”
    “It’s a nonstick pan.”
    “Still,” he said, popping the tops off two beers.
    “What about your arteries?”
    “My arteries