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

blond, the elder athletic and protective of his brother. He’d just come through the trees, a red rubber ball under his arm, and was calling. We dropped our backpacks and joined them for kickball, dust puffing around our feet.

My uncle’s silver truck rolled in, and I ran to see him. My mother referred to him as a local boy, and he towered over me, with a scruffy beard, a receding hairline, and a beer belly that pressed his overalls, outlining the carpentry pencil in the front pocket. He worked in aluminum siding and once showed me a copperhead he’d killed with a piece of firewood. This time, the bed of his truck held two dinosaurian snapping turtles that he’d hooked in a forest pond and brought home to stew.

“They’ll bite your finger clean off,” he drawled as I climbed onto the back bumper.

I definitely wasn’t going to finger these turtles. Both were bigger than hubcaps, their stout heads moving side to side as their clawed feet feebly paddled the puddle of dirty, sunbaked blood. I prodded one with a stick, but it took no interest.

“Can we go fishing sometime?” I asked and jumped down, but he’d turned away as if busy. He often took my cousins fishing, and I didn’t see why I couldn’t go too.

“Here, catch!” he said and tossed a small brown ball. I jumped for it just as I realized it was the soft lump of his chewing tobacco. The slimy wad hit my palm before I could pull my hand away. It broke apart on the concrete. He guffawed and went inside.

The younger neighbor boy ran over and asked, “Aren’t you going to play?”

I gave him a shove, and his legs wobbled like those of a newborn goat as he grabbed for a carport pillar. Instantly, his brother had left the kickball game and was there, fist lifted, eyes shining. “Leave him alone,” he told me.

I just stared off, as if this were the most boring thing in the world.

I took my backpack and sat on the front porch that nobody used, since everyone went in and out the carport door. I opened Taran Wanderer. I’d read Lloyd Alexander’s books at my old school and had liked this one, young Taran questing to learn who his parents were so he could marry Princess Eilonwy. Journey, discovery, the fear of violence—all had kept me riveted. But now I couldn’t focus. I didn’t know why I’d just been so mean. Maybe I was like my father, and I’d grow up to scare everyone.

Now it was my mother who pulled in, the tires of her van grinding the gravel. She worked at the stables where she boarded her horses, and she got out wearing a button-down shirt with rolled sleeves, and jeans, dirt rubbed into the denim on the fronts of her thighs.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Come on. I’m going to look at some places to rent. I just have to change fast.”

I climbed into the van, the hot interior smelling of oats and hay, of dog hair and dust. She came back, wearing a brown skirt and a blouse. We raced along the road, my window down, gusts slapping my face as I held my eyes closed. When I opened them, pastures rolled on toward the low, sloping line of distant mountains. A small farmhouse waited at the end of a winding driveway.

The sun seemed to be setting earlier here, shadows like capes on the backs of hills, and the wind felt particularly cool. I could see myself walking a path that threaded over the pastures. There would be shallow streams, and if I wanted, I could go all the way to where the foot of the mountains disappeared in the haze of distance.

But my mother had already finished talking to the owner. She walked back to the van, her chin lowered, her taut expression indicating she wanted to leave in a hurry.

She cranked the engine, and we jostled over the driveway’s potholes to the paved road. I decided that if I explained how much I liked the place, she’d be happy, but instead she told me that the owner had flat out said he didn’t rent to single mothers.

“Are you a single mother?”

“Yes. I am.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“People think we can’t pay the rent.”

“Oh,” I said. “Can you?”

“Yes, I can. But this place is a bit expensive. It’s not right for us.”

She was driving fast, and I felt nauseous from the van’s soaring motion over the hilly road. I went back to letting the air from the window buffet my face.

This time we turned into a trailer park off a four-lane highway, a honeycomb of staggered mobile homes. I knew from school that the mean kids lived here, and we passed a pack of them, slouching in jean jackets as they looked about with narrowed eyes for something to destroy. They saw me and all laughed, showing their teeth like barking dogs.

“Your hair,” my mother said.

I touched my head. The wind had made my hair stand up straight, as if I’d spiked it with gel like a rock star. I was going to pay for this tomorrow.

At the very back of the trailer park, where a forest began, she pulled up to a drab, white mobile home with gray trim, some of it missing.

A tubby man came out in a dress shirt and a Redskins cap, his eyes wedged up in the shadow of his visor. His mouth opened and stayed that way.

“I thought y’all’r Colombian,” he said with the same ruminating motion as my uncle. He adjusted his visor with a meaty hand like a big, hairy pancake.

“British Columbia,” my mother told him.

“Where’s that?”

“Canada.”

“Well, I was expecting dark little fellers like Mexicans. Come on in.”

Water-stained fleurs-de-lis papered the walls, and in the back bedroom, a yellow cricket perched near a hole in the linoleum, twitching antennae as long as spider legs. I stomped, but not before it dove into its foxhole. My mother had been