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

He murmured prices as silent hockey players slipped across the hazy screen.

After he was off the phone, I waited for him to say something else about crime, but he didn’t, and I was afraid to ask.

✴

IT WAS DARK, raining again as we arrived at the market with two plastic crates of fish, each about five hundred gallons. They’d been loaded by forklift, and normally we emptied them by hand. I hated this work.

“Can’t we just put the truck in reverse and hit the brakes?” I asked. It was the sort of comment I’d made often over the years, adults rolling their eyes, but he turned in his seat to judge the distance to the delivery door.

Sara stood, lit red in our taillights, and he yelled out the window, telling her to get out of the way. He jammed the accelerator, and the truck shot forward and stopped sharply at the edge of the lot. The crates slid to the back window.

“This should work,” he said.

Then he threw the truck into reverse and hit the gas. I twisted in my seat. The market wall was approaching fast. He slammed the brakes.

The tires screeched, and the crates hopped from the bed and seemed to hang briefly. They landed upright and skidded to the wide delivery door.

We got out, shocked into silence, and inspected the crates.

Heads lifted, everyone in the market stared at us, like deer in a field.

He smiled at me, his grin easy, not followed by scrutiny or anger. I laughed as if we’d done something like this every day of our lives, as if we’d just lurched from the railroad before the train passed.

We did it again three days later, though one of the crates spilled, hundreds of small salmon flashing across the market floor, under counters. For the next hour, we gathered them, customers and nearby vendors occasionally bringing us a fish, offering it to us like a wallet forgotten in a restaurant.

✴

“ARE YOU GETTING along with him?” my mother asked the next morning when I called. I’d told my father I wanted to stay home and write. He’d agreed, though he’d left with a scowl.

“Of course,” I said in an annoyed voice and began describing his life.

“Be careful,” she said. “He might be recording his calls.”

“I doubt it.”

The gray, loosely kinked phone cord lay on the dirty rug.

“What school are you going to go to?”

“We’ve looked at a few …”

“A few …,” she repeated. “You should enroll soon.”

“I know. I will. Don’t worry. I’ll be fine.”

After our conversation, I wandered through the house. There were details I found strange: a sign on the kitchen wall that read God Bless This Mess, or doilies on the couch’s end tables, a vase of withered flowers in the dining room. It was as if a woman had been living there.

His bedroom had the musty smell of a lair. Heaps of stiff clothes covered the floors of his closets, loosely folded jeans and button-down shirts on top of his dressers, price tags still on them. I counted a dozen pairs of running shoes, the laces and suede white, the soles unscuffed. Each had an orange sale sticker. In the closet, between two casual leather jackets, a Kmart bag on a hanger held seven red shotgun shells.

They felt heavy and cold in my palm. The printing on the casings read Slugs.

I went to the dresser and opened a drawer full of photographs. A blond infant standing among dandelions. Two boys playing at the edge of a mud puddle. There were no images of me past the age of ten, as if my life had ended.

In a field, my mother held me, my brother standing next to her. My father must have taken the photo. Maybe she’d had wildness in her too—the way she’d run away, rejecting the Vietnam War and her family. She’d wanted a free-spirited life and had probably thought she could find that with him. But she’d seen something other than a criminal. I knew her. If she hadn’t, she wouldn’t have stayed.

I kept searching. A rubber band held a dozen social insurance cards, each with a different name, one of them my brother’s. My father must have named him after one of his aliases. He wouldn’t want to live under a name he didn’t like—and naming oneself, starting a new life, might be like naming a child.

I pulled a box from under the bed: every sort of card, Christmas, birthday, get well, all unused, all for children. Another box was filled with fishing equipment, tangled lines and lures, faded cork floaters, three-pronged hooks, a hand scale, a fly-fishing kit, a bag of old back-lashed reels.

I found a Valentine’s card I’d made for him in school, concentric multicolored hearts on construction paper, like the echo of affection. I sat in his chair. On the wall were three portraits of us our mother had given him for his birthday, simple charcoal sketches by a mall artist that made us look chubby.

I hadn’t found the shotgun in any of the obvious places.

Nothing, not even the trees outside, seemed to move, and then a German shepherd barked behind the house.

✴

SARA SAT ON the freezer next to me, thigh to thigh, and took my hand and held it in her lap in a childish way. “Does André talk about me?” she asked.

I hesitated. He’d just gone to get something from his truck. I couldn’t figure out their relationship, because she never came by his house and she mostly spoke of her high school friends, though she’d recently dropped out.

“Well, yeah,” I told her, “I guess. I mean, he likes you.”

“Really?” she said.

He came back into the market, walking quickly, and then slowed, seeing us sitting close.

“You ready?” he called as if distracted. I got off the freezer.

Soon we were back at Knight and Day, beneath the same dim, green metal lamps. He hadn’t said much other than to order, and sat, rolling the edge of his paper