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

had to stop thinking, just force my way into the house and take the money.

“What?” the girl said after I knocked again. The door was barely open, still chained. With a kick, I could break in. That she didn’t threaten to call the police seemed a sign of her guilt. But as I was asking for the money, trying to explain, a feeling of disgust came over me, so strong I wanted to vomit.

I walked back to the road.

My father’s truck returned and stopped, and I got inside.

He asked me nothing.

✴

A SPACE HEATER sat on the freezer, and Jasmine and I held our hands before it, staring at the line as hazing rain iced up the road. I’d finished reading my last novel, yet another world saved from cataclysm. The sky here was as dark as in that land whose sun had been extinguished, but it wasn’t my destiny to change it. I wished snow would fall and erase everything.

A radio was on the shelf, and having nothing to read, I took it down. I cleaned dust from the dial and then searched the static until a voice came through with startling clarity.

The forecast was dismal. The weatherman mused that a white Christmas would be nice, not this slush and freezing rain. Then an announcer gave the time. He spoke of the year in review, the historic events the world wouldn’t soon forget. In December alone, Czechoslovakia and Romania had overturned Communist dictatorships. The list included Tiananmen Square and the anti-apartheid movement, Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Democracy movements were taking over in Latin America, General Colin Powell was the first black chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, New York had its first black mayor, and Virginia had elected the first black governor since Reconstruction. There was the three-million-dollar price on the head of Salman Rushdie by Ayatollah Khomeini, and later the ayatollah’s death. The recap went on, a countdown not unlike Casey Kasem’s American Top 40, but edged with violence and urgency. These events, the world itself, seemed in no way connected to my life, and I couldn’t imagine writing something important enough for people to want to kill me.

“Why do you stay here?” I asked, standing as if to pace the tiny room. I said how angry I was, that I felt trapped.

A flush came into her cheeks. Her eyes were suddenly wide and bottomless.

“Stop complaining,” she told me.

✴

FOOTSTEPS ON THE porch woke me. Jasmine turned her body to fit the register drawer through the doorway. Outside, the string of colored lights swayed. The rain had stopped.

She set the drawer on the kitchen table and came into the room. I moved my feet so she could sit on the couch.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

“Yeah, I’m fine.”

She put her hand on my leg and rubbed it. We just stared at each other, her fingers on my thigh.

“I want to tell you something,” she said.

“What?” I asked, still half-asleep.

“Your father and me—we used to live together.”

I didn’t speak. Her hand rested on my jeans, slightly curled, awkward now, and she took it away and put it in her lap.

“He made me stay here because you were coming,” she said.

When I’d called from Virginia to ask if I could live with him, I’d heard a woman’s voice and the sound of dishes being washed.

She described the last few years, the way he’d started his business again, her words reminding me of how he’d worked when I was a boy. She thought they’d have a family.

The clang of the ferry docking filled the silence.

I said nothing, and after a while, Jasmine put her hand on my side, as if to comfort me.

✴

CHRISTMAS EVE, A wind blew up. Frost patterned the dirty windows, the yard a sheet of ice. Tepid air blew in the vents, and I woke on the couch, wondering if I’d been remembering or dreaming the valley: clouds moved too quickly, turning in on themselves as our mother led us across a field of dead grass, the far-off pines the only green on the mountain. Her graying hair was pulled back, and it seemed that the warmth of my hand against my chest was the reassurance of hers. We’d gone for a walk after the snow had melted. In the way she’d breathed and carried herself, I’d sensed her relief that winter was finally ending.

And then, in sleep, just images. A tree shrouded in mist. A child straggling below mountains. The valley echoing with hoots and laughter, and then so silent that a German shepherd came to the slats of the pen and peered at the heavy sky.

I sat up, unsure of where I was. I rubbed my eyes. The curtains were drawn, a wand of streetlight through a hole. I lifted my fingers to it and they glistened. The furnace thrummed and wind rattled the panes. When I opened my eyes again, the room held a thin gray light.

No sounds came from the ferry landing, no idling engines in the line. I slid the curtains open. The asphalt glistened, its cracks and crumbling shoulder a sheen of ice.

I pulled my shoes on and went outside. The cold had thinned the mist that lingered, pushed about by the wind. Far above, sunlight flirted with the clouds. The cold felt good in my lungs. It made me want to clean out everything, to leave and forget. I stepped carefully up the driveway and onto the landing, the walk separated by a railing and scattered with salt. Melting ice dripped into the water from the planks beneath me.

The river stretched out, gray and faintly rippled, so wide that the opposite landing resembled a snag of driftwood. The ferry, a white barge parked among the lit poles, began to hum.

Halfway along the docks, I stopped. As the sun penetrated the clouds, I glimpsed high mountains in the distance. The ferry set out, its wake grooving the water. A tiny figure stood at the