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

was prodding more than eating. When I told him what I’d read, he said, “I don’t think that’s true.” He picked up his water and emptied it, and then put down the misting glass. He sighed, lowering his chin, the skin loose at his throat.

“The older generations were hard people,” he told me. “You wouldn’t understand. You’ve had it easy. When the winters were bad, the men would leave their wives and children with the food and they’d go into the woods to live with nothing but their guns and tools. They’d just hunt and find ways to survive. That way they didn’t take away from what the family had.”

I was going to ask about my grandfather, but he was staring past me, above the buffet, squinting. I turned. Over the kitchen door, a plastic sign showed a cartoon pig rolling in food: Take What You Can Eat, and Eat What You Take.

He shook his head.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“They had the same fucking sign in prison.” He shoved his plate back, spilling rice on the table. “If people are paying, it shouldn’t be there.”

He got up from his chair and left.

✴

WHEN I WAS six, at a time when his business was growing rapidly, he told me that a man who owed him money had agreed to give him anything we wanted from his house.

“It’ll be like going shopping without having to pay,” he explained to my brother and me.

He laid out the plan. We would carry cardboard boxes into the house, and my brother and I would pillage the bedroom of the man’s son while our father did the kitchen and living room. My mother refused to go.

“It’s wrong,” I heard her tell him.

All the houses on the street were a lot newer than ours. My father knocked loudly and turned the handle, opening the door and calling inside with a playful voice—“Anyone home?”

“Hey, André,” the man said, sounding tired. Bald but for some carroty fluff, he slouched, hands in his pockets. “Go ahead. Take what you want.”

My father perused the kitchen, putting a few pots in his box. He snatched a lamp and said, “Hey, this is nice!” The man watched from the corner, and I sensed an intention to humiliate in how my father dismissed objects. He poked at some oven mitts and made a nasal sound to indicate no. He opened drawers and didn’t bother closing them.

“Go on upstairs,” he told my brother and me. “Take whatever you like.”

I wanted this to be one of our wild adventures, but I knew it wasn’t—that laughing now would be wrong. My brother and I climbed the stairs and hesitated at a doorway. Toys covered shelves and the floor, and a big boy with red hair and freckles blocked us and crossed his arms.

“Stay out of my room!” he shouted, but his father hurried up the stairs and pulled him down the hall by his elbow.

My brother and I began filling our box with the sort of loot extolled on TV: GI Joes, Star Wars toys, and Gobots. We took it all and went out to where my father was putting boxes in the truck, already having loaded a mini pool table. The boy was sitting on the steps, staring off.

I took a Gobot from the box and offered it to him.

He stared at the blocky figure in my hand and then glared into my eyes.

“Keep it, you fucking frog!”

I didn’t know what he meant, but I recognized an intention in his insult that was deeper, more direct than profanity.

Years later, after my mother had left my father, during our first week of school in Virginia, my fifth-grade teacher announced that we’d be watching a video about racism.

She wheeled the TV to the front and put in a tape. The narrator told the story of a neighborhood where the English and the French didn’t like each other. We saw the lives of two boys, one from each background, and at some point the French boy, with his gang of friends, jumped the English boy on his way through an alley and took his money.

“You frog!” the English boy called him.

When the video ended, all eyes were on me. I’d known I was in trouble the moment it started. In a school where black and white kids fought in the halls, it was strange that the video would be about French and English Canadians. She’d wanted to teach the other students about where I came from, and now she asked how I felt about it. “It sure wasn’t easy to get a video about Canada,” she said, “but I finally found one!”

When I didn’t respond, she added, “You don’t want to say anything?”

“No,” I told her.

Later, on the playground, a group of boys came over, their shoulders rolled forward and their hands half-lifted, ready to begin throwing punches.

“Hey, frog!” one of them called. “Are you a frog?”

“No.” I tried to think fast. “The frogs are from somewhere else.”

“Oh,” the boy said, he and his gang clearly disappointed.

After dinner on my eighteenth birthday, I couldn’t stop thinking about my father’s omissions. I no longer wanted stories about prison or his ambition to pull the big job and throw it all on the betting table; I wanted to hear those muted recollections of the life he’d fled.

✴

THE HIGHWAY CURVED beyond our headlights, following the mountain. As he drove toward Squamish, he told me how he and my mother had lived out there, in a cabin near the river. He’d made some speed and sewed a sample into the seam of his jacket, but on his way into Vancouver to deliver it, he’d realized the police were following him. He drove to a garage and sloppily painted his van green and then hurried home but came to a highway checkpoint.

“This cop, he had a sense of humor. He asked if I’d been drinking. I said no, and then he said, ‘I liked your van better when it was blue. Have a good