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

“I wanted to come back, but I wasn’t allowed.”

“You could’ve run away,” he said, his lip drawing back from his teeth, one of his incisors faintly leaden. “It’s easy. You just take a bus. You stole a motorcycle but you couldn’t figure out how to come back.” He then repeated, “Five years,” as if these words contained all the wrong in the world.

I finally understood. All this time he’d been torn between pride and anger. I’d come back, so in a way he’d won. But I’d also let him down.

“She said you were dangerous,” I offered.

“What? She had no right. The day she left and took the three of you, I came back to the house while she was packing. She had some friends helping her. They were from one of those spiritualist groups, and they all got scared and left, even the men. A bunch of cowards. She told me you guys were in the States already. She said the police knew all about it.”

He took a long, uneven breath.

“I’m not allowed across the border. She knew what the police could do to me…”

He was searching for the point he was trying to make, sounding as if he was continuing an argument he’d carried on in his head for years.

“I let her leave. I didn’t have to do that.”

I had nothing to say. I’d finished eating and now I listened, forced to wait this out just as I was waiting out my detention by the river.

“You can’t understand what it was like,” he said. “After she took you, I spent weeks in bed. I couldn’t do anything. I could barely move.”

He was staring through me, his eyes shining, wet with rage.

“I deserve another chance,” he told me. “I’m still young.”

He picked at his cold fries. He pushed one around the plate, smearing the ketchup, and then ate it.

A tall, stooped man with pens in his shirt pocket came from the kitchen, and my father smiled, instantly transformed. He shook his hand. It was the manager, asking what fish were available. My father introduced me as his son, but I didn’t offer to shake the man’s hand. I barely nodded.

After he left, as soon as the kitchen door closed, my father leaned forward.

“Let me tell you something. That guy—you don’t know a thing about him. He could be anybody. He could kill you just like that. I once saw a guy get his head blown off. We were in a bar in Alaska, and a friend I worked with got into an argument with a pimp. The pimp walked away, but he sent his whore over to slap my friend. My friend didn’t say anything. He just left. Then ten minutes later, he came back with a shotgun and emptied both barrels in the pimp’s face.

“I saw that guy years later in the pen, and he told me he didn’t regret a thing. He wasn’t crazy. Even in the pen, he kept to himself. That’s how easy it is. So don’t go making people feel stupid. A man has to live with himself. Be polite.”

✴

SLEET WAS FALLING hard, obscuring the drab country beyond the highway. Ice gathered on the windshield, and the wipers pressed it away in layers. His hands gripped the steering wheel. In the gloom, they seemed too large, reminding me of when I was a boy.

“You think you’re tough,” he said, and from his tone I knew he’d do something, the way as a child I’d sensed his recklessness moments before he swerved through traffic.

I didn’t speak, and he continued. “That’s good, because you’re going to do a job for me.”

He cut into a subdivision of identical unkempt houses, the postage-stamp yards tangles of frozen weeds. He coasted a ways and stopped.

An old Ford tow truck filled a driveway, all bare rusted metal and tied-up chains. It belonged to Brandon, a man who occasionally worked for him—a slacker who always wore a stained Canucks cap. I’d met him at the market.

“Brandon owes me fifty dollars. I want you to get it for me.”

He groped beneath the seat, pushing at pop cans and candy bar wrappers, and took out a wooden baseball bat with Slugger printed on the side. He put it in my hands.

“Fifty dollars is nothing,” I said, digging my fingertips at the smooth, hard wood.

“It’s a question of principles. I don’t let anyone laugh at me.”

As soon as the door closed, he pulled away. I was instantly wet. The bat felt too heavy, and I cradled it against my arm. The print on the side said it had a lead core.

My footsteps moved far below my body as they carried me toward the door. The house was small, with gray plastic siding. I hesitated and then knocked.

A pregnant girl answered. She was hardly older than me—blond, her skin shiny—sickly—and her abdomen bulged below her breasts, her protruding navel visible through a man’s T-shirt that was stretched and threadbare and yellow with age.

“Is Brandon here?” I asked, holding the bat casually in back of my leg, as if I were inviting him out to play.

“He’s gone,” she said, her eyes widening.

“I’m supposed to pick up some money he owes my father.”

“He’s not here.” Her posture was rigid, her movements stiff—both of us caught in the same automatic dream. She closed the door and snapped the lock.

I drifted to the sidewalk as rain made icicles in my hair. I couldn’t manage this simple task, the amount of money insignificant. I considered the child growing inside the girl’s belly, the life it would have.

I circled the house, through weeds and mud, peering at drawn blinds as water seeped into my shoes. I stopped at the tow truck. I squinted into the cab and under the crumbling chassis. My shoes squelched. I could beat on the tow truck, though it looked as if it had already endured the bats of numerous creditors. I told myself that I