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

“I do,” I repeated.

“I worried that if I told you, you’d be upset …”

I moved my lips to speak again but he said, “I was thinking maybe you could take some time off. You could come out here and help me, and maybe we could get the market going again.”

“I can’t do that,” I said too quickly. “I don’t want to work in your business.”

“I understand. But maybe in the summer …”

“I can’t,” I told him, wishing I could find a gentler way to say this. I added, “I’ve been writing all your stories.”

“Good. I like that you’re writing them.”

In the long silence that followed, I thought of all he’d described—journeys that never quite linked up and how he’d wanted a new life for so long that he’d learned to live for the pleasure of hunger alone. Hunger for the unattainable, for what you will never have and what will never disappoint you. Hunger for solitude, where no matter how you grapple with yourself, you will always be victorious. Hunger for intensity, a sensation like the seed of all experience stripped of its colorings and shells, made the same, so that whatever has been lost can be gained again in something else, so that nothing is desired for what it is, only for a fleeting moment of connection, of recognition, before it has been expended and cast away. Hunger for truth, for love, for God, for a single thing that we can trust because it is not of this world. Hunger for the perfect pleasure of wanting, a hunger that lasts so long it can no longer be cured in the ways we are told it should, by the simple joys of life.

I carried the phone to the window. The moon lit the clouds. The unreal past was there, winters returning, blown across the yard in gusts and flurries.

THE LONGEST HIGHWAY

By the time my parents met, my father had his German shepherds, one black and tan, the other black with a silver flare at the throat. He’d received early parole and lived in a van, fishing and sleeping under the stars.

When he’d spoken of meeting my mother, saying, “I ordered ham and eggs and left with her,” I hadn’t understood what had brought them together. But maybe it’s fair to say that there are simple needs, empty spaces that must be filled.

Twenty years old, she’d separated from the draft dodger she’d followed to Vancouver, and, loving Canada, had stayed. She met my father and they traveled, but eventually he needed money and went looking for men from his past. He began making speed for a friend.

“That friend …,” he’d told me, “he was the guy who got his eyes burned, the one who set fire to the apartment in Hollywood. He still couldn’t see too well. I felt sorry for him. He had this idea, for the speed. He had the recipes and ingredients. I thought I could help him out.”

The story lacked ballast—that he, who’d brutalized others, had forgiven so easily. But the friend had been in his life for years, he explained. He’d been a partner in many crimes. My father likely had his sentence reduced by making a deal with the police, and so had tempered his view on disloyalties.

He never described the period following this clearly. When my mother got pregnant, he quit crime, not wanting another child born while he was in prison. He believed that a family would hold him in place and give him satisfaction. To make money, he began buying and selling salmon. He still had to check in with his parole officer and had received permission to visit his son in the US, but he decided to break contact, as he did with his family in Quebec after calling his mother a few times.

“I wanted my own life,” he told me. “Too much had changed.”

Those years, he built dog pens, put up fences, sold trees, and established stores. He hadn’t been sure he’d enjoy this work, but the skills his father had taught him came back quickly—the fish on this coast not so different, his hands moving the knife on their own, working him past the soft boundaries of memory. Often, it seemed he was challenging himself to do as much as he could, satisfied with the authenticity of the life he was building, affirming his strength and finding new ways to grow.

I recalled his transformations during that period. One morning he came out of the house wearing a sports jacket, a briefcase in his hand. Our mother sat on the steps as we played. Wind rustled the leaves of the tree near the porch, casting a shadowed map of branches and sunlight across his face. He tugged at his sleeves, and she looked up. I watched, sitting on my bicycle, one foot on the ground, and she laughed. It was a laugh of pleasure and surprise, but he flushed and walked to his truck and left.

✴

AS FINAL EXAMS neared, I called my father less often. I watched myself study. I was withdrawn. Daily, I walked the road to school and on occasion drove my uninsured SUV into town, usually after midnight, to the twenty-four-hour supermarket, the streets empty beneath cold Christmas skies—colored lights on a few leafless trees.

The next time I called, I again tried to ask about his family, but he turned the conversation back to crime.

“I never lost heart,” he said. “I always had the nerve. I remember the last bank I tried to rob. I was with a guy who’d pulled a lot of jobs. I’d seen him rob other places. But we walked around the building, and he couldn’t get his mask on. He kept saying, ‘Not yet.’ After we passed the door the last time, he told me he couldn’t do it. He was sweating and shaking. He didn’t know what the point was anymore. He told me he just wanted his life to be simple. We were in the alley, and he asked