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

discussing the price, and they paused when my shoe banged down. I heard her say she’d take it.

As we were returning to my aunt’s, I blurted, “I wish he’d die.”

“What?” she asked. “Who?”

“André. Everything would be easier if he were dead. We could have stayed.”

She swerved off the road and grabbed my arm.

“Don’t ever say that again.” She shook me, but I pulled free.

“Why are you so afraid of him?” I asked.

She’d had her hair cut so that it framed her face, and her eyes seemed bigger, their blue crystalline. I wanted to know why we needed to go so far away, or what about my father kept her up at night or caused her and my aunt to shut the bedroom door and talk in hushed voices.

“There are things I can’t explain until you’re older,” she told me. “I promise I will someday.”

I glared off angrily, but in truth, she’d said enough. Her words, few as they were, created a sense of expectation better than in any book. They were the proof I’d been right all along to have suspicions about my father. There was a reason for everything that had happened.

✴

WHILE MY MOTHER worked on the horse farm and as a secretary at IBM, my brother, sister, and I lived off ramen. We tried every sort, discussing whether beef, chicken, or seafood, with its packets of salty shrimp powder, was better. If we discovered a new flavor at the supermarket, we gathered like rock ’n’ roll groupies around an album.

“Pork! This one’s pork!” or “Hot and Spicy! There’re only three! They’re mine!”

School lunches consisted of flavorless rectangular pizzas marked with what looked like tire tread, as well as chocolate milk, fries, and the indispensable ketchup that, in Virginia, was considered a vegetable so as to complete our nutritional requirements.

Meals like this sent a pang of disappointment through my gut. Hunger stalked me like a school bully. Hunger slept on my belly like a hot cat. Hunger barked me into a panic like a vicious neighbor’s dog when I walked the road. I craved our meals in the valley, heaped spaghetti or large bowls of meaty soup.

Good books were increasingly scarce. At the school library, I scoured the shelves. I’d reread Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Lloyd Alexander, and Madeleine L’Engle, so I started in on mythology, hoping for relief. The Greeks evoked the beginning of civilization so clearly I pictured the first, brilliant dawn above the glimmering new earth and wished I’d been there to see how it was before things got bad, which didn’t take long. The Norse liked the end, Ragnarok, doomsday, the sun swallowed by a wolf, the gloom of winter.

The square of bisected morning sunlight made its way across the wall as I lay with the only mythology book I had yet to finish. The metal roof of the trailer popped and ticked as if the sun were tapping fingers on it, and the room was getting muggy. My mother had gone to see her horses, my sister had spent the night at a friend’s house, and my brother sat cross-legged before the TV, his Commodore VIC-20 plugged into it while he learned to program BASIC 2.0 from a dog-eared manual.

I went out the side door and stood in the sun, stretching my arms above my head.

A classmate’s older brother, a stooped young man named Earl Darwin, walked down the street with a metal detector.

“Hey!” I called, and he turned, moving as if carved from wood. He spoke with strained vocal cords, invisible hands strangling him.

“What?” he squawked.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m prospecting for Civil War artifacts.”

I asked what he meant, and he explained that he explored pastures with the metal detector. He showed me a green army shovel with a folding blade.

“If I dig for you, can I come?” I asked, thinking that finding ancient things was kind of like reading myths. He just said, “Sounds good to me.”

As we walked down the long incline of mobile homes, their metal roofs throwing sunlight into our eyes, he asked about my family and how long I’d been here. He couldn’t believe I had no religion, and, like Darwin himself—but in his own fashion—he set forth the order of the world: white churches and black churches, bad people and good ones, heaven and hell, a neighbor who shook in his lawn chair because he’d smoked oregano soaked in transmission fluid, a six-toed window washer who slept with all the single mothers, a teenage girl who’d gotten pregnant because the guy skimped on condoms and used Saran Wrap.

He clued me in on trailer-park characters: the fat black boy whose father brought him a GI Joe every week though the boy always tied them to a stake, doused them in gasoline, and torched them next to the windmills and flamingos on his tiny lawn; the pale muscular boy with sunken eyes who we saw surrounded by girls as he lifted his bicycle with one arm, a feat for which, Earl explained, he got laid—what I imagined might be like getting tucked in. He added that the boy’s father had been killed in the field below the trailer park, his head staved in by a two-by-four. It occurred to me that something wasn’t right with the fathers around here.

“He deserved it,” Earl told me as we crossed the four lanes of highway into the horse pastures. “He was a faggot and kept grabbing people.”

Over the next hour, each time his detector bleated, I dug up Civil War treasures: buckles from belts, boots, and harnesses, as well as lead bullets—dozens of them, a few mashed from impact. The thrill of discovery had me panting, hunched, scouring the red clay with my fingers until the object came into sight. This, I suddenly knew, was my purpose. Archaeology! I felt that we’d soon discover something amazing, a golden statue of Zeus or a Roman helmet.

An old farmer came out to see what we were up to.

“I dug up a safe one time,”