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

He stopped, his gaze following the zigzags and straightaways of the red racer, his head moving like that of a cat watching a bird.

“You’re gonna give me that car,” he said.

“What?”

“I’m gonna take it.”

I pushed the antenna down in the handset and went to stand next to the car.

“My dad gave it to me,” I said. “You’re going to have to fight me if you want it.”

He considered this, his whiskery little face chewing at the thought.

“Well then,” he said, “I’m gonna go get my daddy’s gun and shoot you.”

I picked up the car and ran. I entered the trailer as Dickie and my mother were kissing, one of his hands reaching into her blouse.

“They’re going to shoot me!” I shouted.

I raced for my room, leaped into bed, and closed my eyes, clutching the car, its hot motor against my chest.

CROSSING WIDE SPACES

Not long after my mother met Dickie, we all got hepatitis A from devouring a dip that had soured for days on my aunt’s table. While my mother was at work, Dickie showed up and took us to his house, jauntily saying that we’d be better off under his care. That evening, she picked us up in a fury, her hair disheveled and the first pallor of illness in her face.

“How dare you take my children without my permission!”

“Hey, hey, I’m sorry—”

“No, don’t you think for a second you know what’s best for them. If you want to help, you ask me. You call me. I’ll tell you where they belong.”

He kept saying please and sorry, something my father never would have done. I expected her to throw him out, but he stayed, taking care of us, doing what she asked. Not long after, we moved in with him, into a brick rambler near Bealeton, a town that was little more than the intersection of two highways, a 7-Eleven, and a makeshift flea market with booths of pirated heavy-metal cassettes, secondhand tools, and Elvis memorabilia. Thirty feet of lawn separated our house from Route 28, and the fields beyond our backyard were overgrown, strewn with trash, and slated to be razed for a shopping center.

My mother, who’d never married, because my father had refused, tied the knot with Dickie in a courthouse pit stop. Over the next three years, she accompanied him to annual sales conferences in New Orleans and Ocean City. He had two weeks a year for vacation, and we visited his family farm near Canton, Ohio, where his nephew had his uniform number shaved into his crew cut and I learned to make a muffler out of beer cans. The men fished at night, drinking as they jacklighted carp, shooting them with a bow and arrow. Whenever I expressed boredom, Dickie handed me an old bolt-action rifle and sent me to eliminate groundhogs, whose holes could break a horse’s leg, though the pastures had long been unused, given over to a few rusted oil jacks that wearily raised and lowered their prehistoric bird heads.

The only constant those years was the van. We didn’t eat meals together, so we never seemed a family more than when we were on the road. If Dickie drove, we became prisoners, the van suddenly a box, a fight brewing, electricity in the air as before a summer storm. But like my father, he couldn’t handle it, complaining that the wheel had too much play and felt like driving a boat. My mother sailed it between homes and school and work, used it as a bus for a day care she helped start, and refused offers by a local mechanic who wanted its massive engine for his race car. Her obese coworker at IBM broke the back of the passenger seat, and from then on we drove with my mother sitting up and the passenger reclined, our conversations resembling therapy sessions.

Sometimes, from the back, I stared down on cars piddling along behind. One was a state trooper’s on Interstate 66. Remembering my father’s stories, I gave him the finger, and he pulled us over, inspected the van, and questioned my mother about its origins and registration.

When I was thirteen, I began walking to school, relishing this time alone. After rainy nights, passing cars fanned moisture against my face. Or warm afternoons, I took a shortcut home through farmland, breaking dry stalks in my fingers, staring out over yellow fields gone to seed, the tall, rangy trees on windbreaks like images from the African savannah.

But wandering the halls, I cautiously eyed the clusters: rednecks and metalheads, preps and nerds, army brats with Nuke Kaddafi pins on their jean jackets. Sometimes I hung out with white kids, sometimes with black kids. Eventually, they all told me I was weird and to go away. My mother’s talk about purpose made me surly. She’d forced me to take French 1, and even though it was ridiculously easy, whenever the teacher asked me a question, I’d say, “I don’t know.” I had no idea why I’d learned this language that my father hated or what it had to do with his life. A few nights, I dreamed that long black hair covered my body and I played football, though in reality I couldn’t. My mother had banned me from violent sports not only because it was for brutes but because we had no insurance.

Only when I read or wrote did I feel calm. I wondered if my siblings felt the same. My brother played video games as soon as he came home from school, his blinds drawn, his room a dim cavern. My sister sang behind her closed door, listening to the radio.

None of us had stopped changing since we’d crossed the border. My mother was different each time I blinked: cutoff jean shorts, a yellow halter top, a tight perm, and then, before a dinner with Dickie, wavy hair and a narrow blue dress with heart-shaped mesh that showed a hint of cleavage. The