Cures for Hunger by Deni Béchard (story books for 5 year olds txt) 📕

stayed, he’d give me direction and teach me how to fight.

Dawn lit the rural dregs of a landscape bought up and hewn into subdivisions, the bashed fenders and bald tires and rusted appliances of forgotten lives appearing through the October leaves after a dry summer. On the gravel shoulder, I saw myself from the sky, as if my father might be looking down, ashamed of my worn-out jeans and dirty sneakers, the scraps and flattened cans, the cigarette butts and bottle caps that littered my path.

✴

WE WERE MOVING again, to a mobile home in the woods, beneath a colossal electrical tower whose lines cut a swath through the boondocks. My mother and Dickie would build a house there, and the cramped trailer would be temporary quarters. But I didn’t care. I was almost fifteen.

I walked to the neighbor’s carport and knocked. The last of the evening commute shuttled along Route 28. The woman answered, the TV loud inside.

“My friends and I put some money together,” I told her. “It’s almost enough. I thought maybe I could try the motorbike out first.”

“Sure,” she said, again perking up at the mention of money.

I felt as I had standing next to the highway at night, inching nearer to each passing rig, wind against my skin and in my hair, metal streaming just before my eyes.

The yellow raft slid from the bike frame. The woman just stared.

“My stepson must have taken all the parts.”

I made myself appear disappointed, even a little angry.

“I wanted to buy it. I was trying to get the money together.”

She went into the kitchen and took the phone. An argument ensued between the father watching TV and drinking beer, and his son on the phone, as she repeated what they said.

“I didn’t touch your piece-of-crap bike,” the father yelled over his shoulder.

“He said he didn’t touch your bike,” she called into the phone.

“Your loser friends probably did it,” the father hollered. “They know you don’t use that thing.”

When they finished and she hung up, I chewed my lip and shrugged.

“Hey, look, I guess I could use the frame if you’re just going to throw it away.”

“I don’t know,” she said.

I took a twenty-dollar bill from my pocket.

“I could give you twenty dollars for it.”

She stared at the money.

“Oh, heck,” she said and reached for the bill. “I’m just going to say we threw it away.”

✴

THAT WEEKEND, I packed: childhood books on fish and myths; the many fantasy series, Civil War accounts, and tomes about ancient cities; and of course Steinbeck’s novels. They all traced a line into mystery: primal shapes beneath dark water, the world’s creation, the excesses of violence and the ceaseless vanishing of empires, and at last, the solitary longing of a drifter.

We moved into the trailer and, a few days later—the first time I was there alone—I took the phone into the trailer’s back bedroom. My father’s number had changed again, and I dialed it collect from yet another card he’d sent.

“I want to go back and live with you,” I told him as soon as he answered.

A woman chatted in the background, dishes clinking, and he fumbled with the receiver.

“Come back?” The noises became muffled, as if he were holding his hand over the mouthpiece.

“I want to live with you. I’m almost fifteen. I’m allowed to now.”

He didn’t speak, and I added, “I need to get away from here. I hate it.”

“Okay,” he said.

“Will you send me a ticket?” Asking this, I had never felt braver.

“Does your mother know?”

“I haven’t told her yet.”

“Tell her you want to get to know me. I’ll send you the ticket, but tell her you want to leave with her blessings.”

When I later repeated his words, saying, “I want to leave with your blessings,” she gritted her teeth. “Don’t you ever use his words with me. He told you to say that.”

“No, he didn’t,” I lied.

She looked tired and distant. I knew that she’d been inspired to build the new house, that she still had energy and hope, but everything was falling apart. It was time for me to leave. It was better for all of us.

“If you don’t let me go,” I said, “I’ll run away.”

“No.” She shook her head. “You don’t have to do that. You can go. I guess it’s what you need to do. When you get the ticket, I’ll drive you to the airport.”

Later, I told my brother and sister, but they didn’t say much. Over the years, we’d become increasingly distant, and now I closed myself off to everyone.

That night, I tried to picture my father but couldn’t. Unable to sleep, I lit a candle as my mother had done for me when I was child wanting to meditate on levitation. I put it on a wooden chair in the middle of my room and then sat and stared, the flame’s faint shifts like those of a feather held between fingertips. Something was being asked of me, and I would face it.

I must have fallen asleep. When I opened my eyes, the candle was gone and the chair was on fire. In that moment, before I panicked, I knew that this was one of the most beautiful things I’d ever seen.

PART III

THE BIG JOB

The last half of my flight was a slow sunset that ended shortly after I landed. Just before Vancouver, the plane dropped into clouds, racing blindly toward the city and mountains I wished to see.

As we taxied on the runway, I read a letter my mother had given me: He could charm anyone. He knew what to tell me to make me do and think what he wanted. But you are more adult than I was. You will see through him and decide what is best. You are your own man, and no matter what he wants, you will make the right decisions….

This was a technique of hers, to praise me for being what she wanted, and after reading her letter, I wondered if she’d learned it from him.