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

four swiveling captain’s chairs, a shag rug, two tables on posts, small ceiling lights like those in airplanes, and a couch that opened into a bed, lit by lamps in plastic shades. Between the front seats, a cover unlatched to reveal the glistening engine, and on the back, a chrome ladder joined a roof rack printed with maple leaves. That first day, I practiced climbing around the van, until I lost my fingerhold and grabbed the antenna, and that was it for FM radio.

My father found the van difficult to navigate through traffic, so he let my mother use it and bought himself a Ford Bronco. She fell in love with the conversion van, its V8 capable of pulling a horse trailer with ease. She said she wanted it and stood her ground until he signed it over and let her make payments.

She drove us kids, as well as our German shepherd, everywhere. High above the road, offering a vantage on the traffic, the van swayed, sailing on its shocks so that we had all, including the dog, vomited on the rug in the days before we got our sea legs. She used it to haul hay and goats, and we took it on road trips, parking on gravel washouts in the mountains where we fished, or to Barkerville to see gold panned by bearded men who my father referred to as winos. She hated these trips, her van back under his control, and while he fished, she packed, unpacked, cleaned and readied the food, demoted from captain to stevedore.

But eventually she completed her mutiny. She drove us across the border and headed east, rushing through that first night.

I slept on the floor, lulled to sleep by the engine’s vibrations. At dawn, I awoke and sat next to her. She studied each car that passed in the side-view mirror.

“Why are you so afraid?” I asked, the first rays of sunlight in my eyes.

“He’s angry,” she said in a measured tone. “I don’t know what he’ll do. He didn’t want me to leave, and … I don’t trust him. He’s dangerous.”

I also glanced behind us as a car pulled close. I wasn’t sure why we should be so afraid, but I recalled the night at the ferry, the blood on his face and hands, the knowledge that two people lay unconscious outside.

“Stay close to the van,” she told us at a rest stop. “Watch out for strange people. He might have sent someone after us. The van sticks out like a sore thumb.”

As she walked us to the bathrooms, she looked at every vehicle, at the shadows behind misted windows.

✴

AFTER WE CROSSED Washington, she bought us plane tickets east, sending us to our aunt. There, we waited, often sitting on the porch, afraid that he’d caught up. A few days later, we were ecstatic to see our mobile mountain pull into the driveway, glittering with dust.

At our aunt’s, we slept on spare mattresses and foldout beds. The phone rang often, and if my mother answered, he shouted so loudly that I could hear the crickety jabbering from across the house.

Days, I roamed the woods, catching crayfish in streams banked with red clay, or I read whatever I found—novels about voodoo and murder. But though the future seemed more exciting than ever, sometimes I began to cry for no reason. Deep sobs that I couldn’t fathom took over, and I wept until my aunt took fistfuls of her blond hair and pulled it so taut that the dark roots resembled a strip of paint.

I didn’t understand why we’d come so far. I’d felt I was the most like my father, and yet I hadn’t cried when we’d left. At night, the phone jangled down the hall, and I awoke, staring at the unlit window. The couch creaked in the living room as my mother got up to unplug the cord.

Everyone in the family got an unlisted number, but an air of tension remained. We enrolled in school, and he called there and spoke to my brother, who, under the scrutiny of the secretaries, couldn’t answer his questions and had to hang up in tears.

At the new school, the principal, a former drill sergeant, strode the halls with his chest puffed up, his hips so wide that his pants looked like jodhpurs. The cafeteria had a traffic light (green for talk, yellow for whisper, and red for silence), and in my fifth-grade class, two white boys with incipient beards got in a fight with two big black boys.

My peers, the white ones, called themselves Rebs. We were studying the Civil War, and they wrote “The South will rise again!” on their folders. Our teacher praised the merits of Robert E. Lee and lowered her voice to confide that the war hadn’t been about slavery.

When the yellow bus finally took me home, I read, slouched low, knees against the seat in front. The ruckus of shouting kids kept distracting me from Taran Wanderer, which I’d found in the library. I read a few lines—Taran setting out on his journey—but then I began thinking about what my father was doing and why everyone was so afraid.

“I fingered her,” a sixth-grader behind me was telling another kid, practically shouting. “That’s right. She let me. She was so tight I could only git my little finger in …”

I narrowed my eyes, trying to stay with Taran. But what in the hell was he talking about? Was fingering like thumb wrestling or mercy? Either way, it sounded like the girl had won.

The bus creaked to a stop and the door flapped open. My brother and sister and I and our oldest cousin, a tall girl with wavy brown hair, climbed down the high rubber-coated steps to the sunlit blacktop. The driveway rose through a corridor of trees, and by the time we reached the carport, we were panting.

Behind the house stretched sunburned yard, sparse woods between it and the green, sprinkled lawn of the neighbor boys, both