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

“It’s rude,” he told me.

“I’m just waiting.”

“You don’t need to read.”

“But I’m just sitting in the truck,” I said.

“Didn’t she teach you to do anything other than read those goddamn books?”

“What?”

“You read those books too much.” He pulled into the street, acting engrossed by the traffic. The way he said books made them sound childish. But I knew he’d probably never read a novel—had never finished a last page or experienced that amalgam of satisfaction and loss.

We drove along the highway through tepid, quickly vanishing sunlight. He had another meeting, he told me, this time in the offices of a packinghouse, and he parked and strode off through the drizzle. Soon, the windows were opaque with rain and condensation.

I put down my book and dug around in the trash on the floorboards for a pen and a scrap of paper. I drew his face, the curl on his forehead making him resemble a cartoonish Elvis—somewhat Mexican, distinctly foreign.

Footsteps padded over the concrete, and his shadow moved across the driver’s window as the door handle clicked. I crumpled the paper.

Our next stop was a late lunch at an A&W. He wasn’t talkative, so I told him about the motorcycle theft, and then, when he showed no interest, about a summer day when Brad and Travis and I had walked the train tracks and decided to derail a train. We’d found a heavy, rusted plate of indeterminable origin and hefted it onto a rail. We’d waited on the embankment, but after an hour the train hadn’t come and we went home.

He just kept dipping fries in ketchup, three or four at a time, and pushing them into his mouth.

“Why do you do this?” I asked.

“What?”

“This work. Fish. It sucks.”

He flinched and then drew himself up, straightening his back.

“You used to love helping in my stores when you were a kid.”

I shrugged, not sure why he cared so much. “What about school?”

“What about it?”

“When am I going back?”

“It’d be better for you to work a bit,” he said. “You were never good at school. Why don’t you take some time off so we can get to know each other?”

“But I am going back, right?” I hated his stores, and school was the only escape I could think of.

Derision tweaked his upper lip, making him look a little like Elvis after all.

“You don’t know how hard it was to get the business going again after the recession,” he said. “Your mother just left. She didn’t care that I was struggling. I lost everything and ended up living out of an old van. You really don’t understand.”

It was my turn to focus on the food. He was blaming my mother for his bankruptcy, but I remembered how he’d spent money before we’d left. Even now he lavished it on employees, tossing crisp hundreds on fast-food counters or giving Sara a fifty and telling her to get herself a coffee, and then not accepting the change.

We drove back through the city, the tops of skyscrapers hidden in the mist. He asked me to help with the next few errands, and this was a relief, though we hardly spoke.

For dinner, we went to another drab restaurant, and I worried that my aloofness might bring out his temper. But he appeared uncertain.

“When I learned to crack safes, I wasn’t much older than you. It wasn’t easy. You had to be really focused, but I liked the challenge. That’s when I started crime. Everything else happened because of that …”

He described his departure from his village in Quebec, how he worked as a logger when he was sixteen, away from home all winter—and then in mines and construction. “But one day a friend died on a high-rise. He fell headfirst, and I realized I had to do something different.”

Someone in Montreal taught him safecracking, he said, his voice becoming angry—and this same person, his first partner, later set him up. In prison, my father learned how to burglarize banks.

“I did a lot after that. I tried to get out of crime a few times, but it was hard to go back to shit work. I ended up in California and Nevada, pulling armed robberies. We’d head to Vegas and blow our earnings in a weekend, and then rob another store or bank, and drive to a resort in Tahoe. I’d grown up with snow, but I had no idea how to ski. We’d buy the most expensive ski clothes and hang out in the bar and pick up models. I’d tell them I was a businessman but that I couldn’t say what I did. They loved it. Then I went to prison again and was deported. That’s when I met your mother.”

He hesitated. “But crime,” he said, “crime was a good life. I’ve seen some crazy things.” He leaned forward, smiling, and described what it was like to blow thousands of dollars in a night at a Vegas casino. “Diana Ross was next to me. If I hadn’t been trying to get back what I’d lost, I’d have taken her home …”

His gaze opened out as if beside me spread the vista of his past.

“What’s the scariest thing you’ve done?” I asked, afraid that he’d stop talking. He looked at me, remembering I was there.

“The time I got the front page,” he said. “I forget which paper it was. I should have made the front page for the burglary, but LBJ got it then. I got the second. He was the president, and that seemed pretty fair to me.

“But the thing is, it wasn’t really me who made the front page. It was the guy I robbed. He owned a jewelry store that’d been held up five times, and he’d just been interviewed for an article on crime in LA. I guess he said something about how he’d never let it happen again. He said he had a gun and would rather shoot or get shot. If I’d known that, I’d have done some other