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

called me into his office. They had agreed to write recommendations, and though the program didn’t offer scholarships, the principal had called its director and explained my situation. He’d proposed using school funds to pay for me.

When the time came to tell my father, I prepared my face.

“Mandarin—what do you mean?” he asked over dinner. “Like the oranges?”

“No. Chinese. I’m going to learn beginner’s Chinese.”

“Chinese!” he shouted and stood from his chair. Other diners turned.

“Fucking Chinese! You’re fucking going to learn Chinese!”

“It’s useful, you know,” I told him—that and some stuff I’d heard at school about how the Chinese might dominate the world. I remained seated, managing to stay impassive.

“But you’re supposed to work for me,” he said, showing his palms and then extending them slowly, as if offering a sword. The gesture was so full of frustration and confusion and supplication that I actually felt bad for him.

“I want to study Chinese,” I insisted, my expression empty, offering nothing he could fight. “It’s a big scholarship. Not everyone gets it. It was made especially for me. I can’t turn it down.”

He dropped into his chair, his mouth open and his eyebrows lifted.

“They made it just for you?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m a good student.”

He nodded once, picked up his fork, and stared down at the heap of twisted spaghetti, shaking his head as if his job were to untangle it.

✴

A STRIP OF yellow light gleamed beneath the drawn blinds. Across the small dorm room, my fat Taiwanese roommate snored. I inhaled the ethereal reek of his father’s cologne, with which he doused himself in hopes, I assumed, of easing homesickness.

That summer had begun with a long sigh of relief, but shortly after I’d exhaled it, I started plotting my next escape. Other students studied Chinese diligently while I wrote stories in my room and daydreamed. Before I’d left for the camp, my father told me that I still owed him that money and had to work it off. He added that if I worked for him, he’d forgive what I owed and would pay me instead.

An angry, restless sweat seeped from my pores and made the sheets cling. He wasn’t going to give up. Like the irregular idle of an old engine, my heart repeatedly grew loud and then faint, as if roaming my chest. A nervous current pulsed along my spine. I got up and left the room. I sat on the dorm steps. Beneath streetlamps, the trees on the University of Victoria campus appeared golden and motionless, peaceful and indifferent.

After a while organizing my thoughts, I went to the pay phone just inside the door. My mother answered on the second ring, her voice thick with sleep. I apologized.

“It’s okay,” she said quickly. “I’m happy to hear from you.”

I described the camp and then brought up my plans for September. She said that if I came back, she’d help me buy a car. She’d bought my brother a used Honda two years before. I told her I didn’t like my father’s life, and I asked why she’d really left him.

“Well, lots of reasons,” she said. “Our relationship might have survived if there’d been family around or even real friends. But there was no one else. He didn’t want anyone to tell him how to live, or to say that he might be doing things wrong. And … and I guess I wanted to change and grow, and I couldn’t do that with him. I had to leave.”

Listening to her, I recalled an afternoon at the Granville Island market, when I was five or six. He’d gone outside and crouched at the edge of the quay. He held his sunglasses a foot before his eyes, peering down through them, something he did to cut the glare on the water in order to see the fish. I came out and, loving his ritual of scanning below the surface, ran to him and tried to climb onto his shoulders, jumping and knocking him forward. He shoved me back, practically throwing himself away from the edge.

“What in the hell do you think you’re doing?” he yelled. “Get out of here!”

My mother came into the sunlight beyond the market building, and I ran to her. When I could talk through my tears, I asked what had made him so angry.

“He can’t swim,” she said, holding me.

“He can’t swim?” I repeated.

“No, he never learned. People don’t swim where he comes from. It’s too dangerous. The water’s too cold.”

I hadn’t realized there were things he couldn’t do. He’d rarely shown weakness, all of us seeming helpless next to him. Maybe he liked us that way.

Even though I knew that I would refuse to work for him, his face came to me, its disappointment and regret each time we’d met for dinner. There were so many aspects to him, so many contradictions. When I was a boy, he’d once sped his truck across a field, racing through tall, sunlit grass until he hit a hidden stump and broke not only his axle but his tooth against the steering wheel. When he came back to the house and told me what had happened, showing me the shard of tooth in his palm, I asked why he drove like that. He appeared confused, unable to explain, and he went on to tell the story again, making it sound as if he were just crossing a field. But having seen him be reckless often, I sensed that he breathed more easily in that headlong rush, and I felt the same way.

After I said good-bye to my mother, I punched in his number. I didn’t give myself time to think.

“Deni,” he said. “How’s your Chinese?”

“Good. Listen. I was thinking about next year.”

“Next year.”

“For eleventh grade. I want to go back to Virginia.”

“To Virginia,” he repeated, his voice absent of intonation.

“Yeah, I want to study there. I like that school better.”

The plan I’d formulated involved turning sixteen in Virginia, getting a driver’s license and a car, and moving out. It wasn’t that