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

Traffic surged past again, and two more openings came and went. My father lowered his window and leaned out.

“Turn!” he roared. “Turn, you son of a bitch!”

The driver hit his accelerator, and an oncoming sedan braked and rammed his fender, crumpling the hood and scattering shards of plastic and glass over the road.

“Jesus Christ!” my father said. He swerved into the traffic and sped away. “I didn’t mean for him to turn right then.”

I looked back at the crushed cars, wondering if anyone had been hurt. Neither of us spoke, and then we glanced at each other and began to laugh.

We were still chuckling and swearing under our breath when he dropped me off. We shook hands, and I told him I’d call, and he said I could always come back if I wanted.

I just nodded, and he started his engine and pulled his truck next to me.

“Hey,” he said. “Do you know I’m the number one driver in Vancouver?”

“What?”

“That’s what everyone tells me. Whenever I drive by, they say, ‘Hey, you’re number one,’ and they do this.” He showed me his hand and lifted his middle finger.

He laughed and jammed his accelerator, spraying slush and oily grit from the asphalt. I covered my face as he scorched a half circle. Then, as if to say that he was the one leaving, he raced onto the street, cars braking and swerving, and soon his truck was gone from sight.

PART V

IMAGINARY FAMILIES

My father and I spoke little over the next year. I traveled to California and stayed with a friend and four other young men in a two-bedroom apartment, writing when I could and working for a temp agency renovating a Sears. We slept on couches around the TV and climbed chain-link fences at night to swim in pools. But the friend started a fight over a girl and I left, though I would have regardless because the next day we were evicted.

When I told this to my father on the phone, he asked me to come back and help at his store. Instead, I headed east, looking for jobs in Utah and Colorado. I wended my way across the continent and by April ended up in Virginia, where I worked construction until college began.

By then I was grateful for it, having struggled to write another novel. I loved the readings and classroom discussions. With each book, I felt myself filled with language, erasing the old patterns words could take, creating possibility. I reread Absalom, Absalom!, searching through threads of identity, the ambition that grew into a man, hiding the initial wounded impulse of a boy.

When I thought about what I might write, I envisioned a great novel just as my father might have imagined the big job. The novels I loved most grew from awareness of family: talk between generations, the shared, conflicting wisdom, parents and grandparents rooting forward-gazing children. Novels seemed the product of that tension, between parents and children, between those they loved and struggled against. They made me realize my ignorance of the dim history that had shaped my father.

During our rare phone conversations, I asked again about his family. As usual, he evaded the questions, saying that too much time had passed, that he had nothing in common with them anymore. When I asked about Quebec, he told me how backward it was, how poor they were. And then he changed the subject to his business. It was struggling, and he asked if I’d come back and help.

My life and ambitions were now so different that I no longer knew where he fit. Only when I wrote did emotions surface, did I feel his absence and worry about him.

The summer after my freshman year, I again worked construction in Virginia. He again asked if I wanted to visit him, but I said it was too far. I feared I wouldn’t make it back to college. My life had an equilibrium—a shape, at last—and I was afraid to disturb it.

✴

SILENCE SETTLED IN the rooms. Through the window, the autumn air was vaguely sweet, flavored with the decay of leaves. The only sound was the dull tap of the few remaining moths against the screens.

A week earlier, I’d moved into an attic apartment on the mountain road leading to school. Two professors rented it to me, and since the house phone didn’t reach my door, I waited for them to leave so I could call my father. I watched their car’s taillights disappear down the curve of the driveway. It was strange to think that at fourteen I’d broken into a house, but now I was so desperate for this life that I was cautious in every way. I didn’t want the professors to overhear my conversations, the casual talk of crime.

I called collect. I’d tried twice that week, but the line had been busy. Now it rang repeatedly. I was about to hang up when he answered, his voice so hoarse I hardly understood it.

The operator gave my name, and he accepted the charges, and then asked, “Who’s this?”

I repeated my name loudly.

“Hey, Deni. Is that you?” he said and coughed.

“Are you sick?”

“A little.”

“It’s nothing serious?”

He coughed again. “Just a minute. I need to clear my throat.”

The phone clunked down. From a distance, there was the reedy sound of a faucet, and then his cough, thick and wet. Sick was a word my father never said. Once, when I was four or five, my mother had told me to leave him alone because he was sick. He’d been sitting in his chair, looking focused and furious—refusing this weakness.

“Are you okay?” I asked when he picked up the receiver again.

“Yeah … I’m fine. I was expecting you to call.”

“I’ve tried, but your line was busy.”

“I’ve been leaving the phone off the hook.”

“What kind of cold do you have?”

He fumbled with the receiver and repeated only that he’d been sick.

“Should I let you go?”

“I just woke up. It takes a minute to get going.”

He coughed