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

pimply cashier had a pierced ear. Dickie had told me that if I ever did this, he’d kick me out. The next week, at the mall, I had it done, and when I returned home, he stared but said nothing. In homeroom, my teacher made me wear a Band-Aid on my earlobe, and I told my father this last detail. He coughed and said, “That’s stupid. What an idiot. Why do people do such stupid stuff?” Then he was quiet.

Pressure was building in my chest. I had so much to ask. The breathless desperation was like the desire for motion that made me walk the highway just to watch semis pass in the night.

“Wouldn’t you like to come see me?” he said.

I didn’t answer. This was the question he used to ask when my mother drove my brother, my sister, and me to a phone so that we could talk to him. He’d say this, and one of us would start crying, and she’d take the phone from our hand and hang it up.

When he spoke again, he sounded drunk, or as if he might cry.

“I held you in my hands.”

“What?”

“When you were born,” he said. “I delivered you.” He’d told this story often years before. We’d be night fishing for catfish, and he’d glance over with fondness and concern and tell me about the umbilical cord around my neck and how angry he’d been at my mother for not wanting to go to the hospital. He’d massaged my chest and blown into my mouth over and over until I began to breathe. That he was telling this now made me feel that he knew everything about me.

“I wanted you to be born in the hospital,” he said, “but your mother had those goddamn ideas of hers. She was afraid of doctors. She hated everything that was modern.”

He hesitated and said that on the day of my birth, she’d left the kitchen a mess and he’d had to wash a pot to boil the scissors. He used to tell me this detail when I was little, and that she hadn’t washed the dishes in time for my birth always seemed grievous. But I smiled now. It was strange that he told the story the same way, that he hadn’t changed.

“She never was much good in the house,” he said. “But I’m the one who brought you back to life, goddamn it. I held you in my hands.”

That night, in a dream, I was alone in the valley. A bear came toward me across the fields, and I ran, calling out to my father. But there was only our distant farmhouse and sheds, dark against the land that unfurled below the mountains.

✴

IN DETENTION, I hunched over The Grapes of Wrath.

My history teacher had told me to read it for extra credit. Forget archaeology’s scurrying martinis and engine-fluid beverages. The bliss of desert solitude, of crossing wide spaces, could be had with no profession at all. I could be a drifter! The more I wanted to set out, the more I thought about my father. As Steinbeck’s characters broke laws and wandered the continent, I tried to understand what drove them.

“Everyone pay attention!” It was Mrs. Henley, our Irish detention monitor. Boys claimed she smoked pot. She was a poet and had delinquents give what she called poetry slams.

“Get out a sheet of notebook paper. If you say one word crosswise, I’ll send you to the office for a paddling so quick your head will spin. Now write whatever you’re angry about. Write what’s making you crazy. Don’t worry about grammar and that stuff.”

After we finished, she had us read what we’d written out loud as she stood in the back of the room in her baggy housedress, loose strands of hair hanging about her puffy cheeks.

Large boys with faces smudged from shop class read poems like “Runaway,” “Juvie,” or “Foster Home.” I wanted to write about how, reading Steinbeck, I’d realized all that I didn’t know about my father and his past, his family, and his reasons for everything he’d done. But I’d be embarrassed to tell the other kids these things, so I scrawled a short poem called “After the End of the World.”

We walked to the lectern with lowered heads, appearing angry, and we listened to each other without looking.

I clutched my poem in my fist so that I had to uncrumple the sheet to read.

desolation

a vast space

crossing through

alone

I went and sat down.

A farm boy with shoulders like a beam got up and read: “We pass like grain through a sieve, a few held back and thrown away.”

I clenched my fists and had to think about my foot in its sweaty sock to keep from tears.

After detention, I caught up with him outside and socked him in the arm.

“What the fuck?” he hollered.

“Fucking poet,” I said.

He shoved me and drove me into the grass, the inside of his arm squeezing my neck. I jabbed my elbow repeatedly at his gut and threw a few punches over my shoulder, with the same awkward motion as scratching my back, but kept missing his face.

Then I stopped swinging, and we both lay there, gasping for air.

✴

THE CUSTODY BATTLE was over.

“I won,” she told us. “The judge denied him even visiting rights.” Legally, my brother, my sister, and I had to wait until we were eighteen to see him, but she thought fifteen more reasonable. She said we could then decide for ourselves.

That evening, I sprayed WD-40 in my door hinges. She was calling her friends, and I crept out, lingering at the top of the stairs, before slinking down to her room like a predator.

“It’s because of his past,” she said. “He’s not even allowed across the border.”

Nothing could sound more menacing or mysterious. I had the impression that my life was suddenly as exciting as I’d wanted.

I heard her say, “he lost because of his record …”

I hovered on the steps, trying to make out other words. Never had