Cures for Hunger by Deni Béchard (fun books to read for adults .txt) 📗

I glanced once at my brother and hesitantly described how I’d knocked Tom into the bricks, spun, and hit him, giving him a bloody nose.

“That’s good,” my father said.

My brother was watching me, nervous and confused. I pinned my gaze on my hands, but it was too late.

“What is it?” my father asked. “Why are you looking at him like that?”

When I didn’t say anything, he turned to my brother.

“Come on. Let’s have it.”

My brother shrugged. He could never lie. I was doomed.

“Deni got help,” he finally said.

“No I didn’t,” I shouted. My tongue curled in my mouth, son of a bitch caught in it, trying to get out as I clenched my jaw to keep it in.

“What help?” my father asked.

Reluctantly, my brother explained, but he was telling it wrong. He hadn’t even been there, and all he described was Jamil protecting me. He had the details right, but the way they went together wasn’t. Tom had almost clawed my eyes out! I’d banged his head against the bricks all by myself. It was a close call!

My father glared at me. “From now on, you stand up for yourself. You can handle a couple of kids, you hear me?”

I wanted to remind him how he and his brother had watched each other’s backs in their village. But there were creases beneath his eyes, and the bones of his skull seemed close to the skin. A look came into his eyes, like that of a dog about to bite.

“Anyway, we all know you’re not too smart,” he said, his lips smiling thinly, showing his upper teeth. He began to say something else, but my tongue came loose and I yelled, “Shut up!”

The room tilted and blurred. I had blood on my lips again. My brother and sister stared into their plates. I felt dizzy and didn’t speak.

As we were leaving, my father kept sighing and rubbing his face and looking over at me, but I ignored him. What he had taught me, I knew, was what I had done. If I could have told the story my way, he’d have understood.

“That fucking bank,” he said to himself. “It’s ruining my life. I’m going to dump a load of manure on their steps.”

I sat near the window, cold radiating from the glass. If the end was inevitable and there was a new beginning, why not get it over with? I’d had enough of my parents’ rage, of them crying out like animals in the night.

The next day, I told my mother that I wanted to leave.

✴

SHE PACKED OUR lunches, but instead of taking us to school, she drove us to the house of one of her friends and told us to stay there and play Dungeons & Dragons.

When she returned, it was almost noon. Everything we owned was inside the van, boxes and blankets crammed to the walls, her favorite German shepherd lying between the seats. Her white horse trailer had been hitched up, both horses inside.

She hurried us into the van, saying she’d explain soon. We drove to the border.

On the interstate, she told us that we would stay with our aunt in Virginia.

My sister began to cry. She said she’d never see her friends again, and my mother told her that she would someday. My brother remained silent, sitting in the back, arms crossed as he stared at his feet. But my rage had been released, and I felt my brain waking up, empty and open, eager to see the world. When we drove through Seattle, I pointed out the Space Needle.

“Who cares,” my brother said, “we’re not here to look at things.”

As I watched the darkening highway, I felt an excitement I couldn’t explain. We were traveling, and maybe someday, when I saw my father again, I’d tell him this story, of leaving, of discovering a new life. We wouldn’t be angry anymore, and he’d tell me everything he’d done after we’d left. He’d laugh and describe how he’d driven into the city and gone to the bank, a salmon in his briefcase—how he’d paid for the safe-deposit box, took the key, and locked the fish inside.

I tried to picture him wild and victorious, the way he’d been when I was little, always laughing, always playing a new trick, but suddenly I was angry again.

The gray dawn reached us as we crossed the mountains east, scars of snow on the roadsides, blue ice on the rocks. The moon was still out above the far, fading lights of distant towns. This wasn’t the journey he’d told me about, the one from which we’d return and start over. And yet I felt the freedom of movement, of newness, the thrill that moves from the heart along the limbs, the desire never to stop, never to be held again in one place.

PART II

GHOSTS OF THE CIVIL WAR

Early in their relationship, my father wouldn’t let my mother drive. He didn’t believe women should. Though my brother could walk to the valley’s five-grade, two-room schoolhouse, she insisted on a better school thirty minutes away. My father, having discovered the demands of driving children, gave her an ancient box truck he’d used to sell fish at intersections before he opened his stores. Its panels were leprous with rust, and the only seat was the driver’s. My sister sat on a wooden stool next to my mother, but my brother and I were happy on the floor because of a rusty hole.

“Get away from it,” my mother told us. Each day, I collected lumps of chewing gum from the playground to see how they thwacked against the asphalt. Even when she yelled, we remained on our hands and knees, studying the blurred, passing grain of the road, pleased when we changed lanes and the broken yellow line flickered past.

In 1980, my father brought home our first new vehicle. The GMC Vandura was earth brown, a three-quarter-ton, and, to my five-year-old eyes, a mountain. It had a cream corduroy interior with