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

hunting to their home beneath the church’s foundation. They sat just outside, nuzzling each other with scarred faces, their calico tufts brilliant in the early light.

✴

MY MOTHER WAS waiting in the parking lot outside Pizza Hut, her van door open. My shift had finished, and I worried that my co-workers would see her.

“How are you doing?” she asked.

“I’m fine. Why are you here?”

“I wanted to check on you. I didn’t know how to get in touch. You should call more.”

“Listen, I can’t talk now.”

“I just wanted to know if you’re finishing school this year.”

“Yeah, I am. I’ll be fine. I have two days left. It’s easy—too easy.”

She stared at me, her gray hair pinned back. She had one hand on the door, her sleeve rolled to the elbow, her forearm finely muscled.

“I’m not moving back,” I told her.

“I’m not asking you to. I don’t know how much longer I’m going to be able to stay with him either.”

“So what will you do?” I said, suddenly worried, and yet angry at her for making me think of anything but myself.

“I don’t know yet. I’m figuring it out.”

“I might go back to André.”

“Have you been in touch with him?”

“No, but I think I could be.” I didn’t tell her that my car had no brakes, or that I was sleeping at a friend’s house. His mother was a guidance counselor and had read an article I’d written for the school paper. When she’d found out I was living out of my car, she’d insisted I stay with them.

“Well, I guess you’re fine,” my mother told me, and we spoke a bit longer, mostly about my classes, before she said good-bye. She gave me a hug, pulling me close.

When she let go, I glanced to make sure that my co-workers were still in the kitchen.

Her van lumbered into traffic and sailed off, and I drove slowly until I was past the stoplights for which I had to turn off the car and downshift. On a country road, coasting over hills, I tried to decide. She’d trusted me. She’d let me take chances and go back to my father. Having fought for her freedom against him, she might have recognized my own need. Remembering this gave me confidence, made me feel that whatever happened, I’d be fine.

I parked at a pay phone. This wouldn’t be a surrender. I’d tell my story, and he’d want me to come back. Moths fluttered about the lit panels of the booth as I dialed.

“You’re doing what?” he said when I told him how I was getting around.

“That’s what you did.”

“That must’ve been in the early sixties. Things have changed. You don’t drive without brakes now.”

“Well, it’s working for me.”

“So,” he said, “what are you doing? Where are you living?”

“With a friend.”

“I’ll give you work. Just get on a bus and come back. I’ll send you the money. Is there a Western Union near you?”

“I can find one.”

Four days later, I boarded a Greyhound, and soon the countryside was scrolling past the windows—the landscape and motion I loved.

I made up stories for other passengers, inventing a more interesting childhood. At one point, another adolescent ruffian chimed in about his own tough upbringing. The competition started, and eventually he tried to convince everyone that, because of a series of motorcycle accidents, all his tendons had been surgically replaced with metal cables. The adults yawned and went back to staring out the windows with the half-lidded eyes of the incapacitated.

The sun was setting above the distant mountains, evening tilting in the sky.

To sleep, I unlaced my shoes and huddled against the window, the vibrating glass cool on my forehead. When I opened my eyes, the dark landscapes dropped away from the highway, mapped out by distant house lights like fallen constellations.

✴

“HOW ABOUT THAT one?” my father asked, motioning with his chin to a small SUV, a red and white GMC. “You can pay it off.”

“But I don’t want to work for you.”

“What do you expect? To get money for free? Come on. I’ll help you buy it. You can do deliveries. It’ll be like you’re working for yourself.”

We stared at the freshly washed SUV, its panels gleaming beneath the June sky. I sensed a trap, but I was desperate for cash.

“Let’s take it for a spin,” he said and elbowed my arm.

He slipped behind the wheel as I got into the passenger seat. He turned the key and pulled out from the parking space into an empty lot behind the dealership. Then he slammed the accelerator and the SUV raced forward, its engine humming smoothly. He swerved side to side and cut an arc like a prankster scorching a doughnut. He hammered the gas and we lunged, my stomach left behind, everything at our sides a blur as we neared the weedy border of the lot. He jammed the brakes, and the SUV lifted on its shocks, tipping its nose to the ground so that I felt I was being catapulted from my seat and put my hands against the dash. The tires screeched but caught, and the air instantly reeked of burned rubber.

He turned to me, his grim humor hardly discernible from rage.

“The goddamn thing works,” he said. “Let’s quit fucking around and buy it.”

That evening, in a Greek restaurant hidden from the highway by an ivy-grown wall, he asked about my plans. I explained that I wanted to do my last year of high school and then travel and write. I’d been gone only nine months, but he listened intently, as if I’d earned his respect. Or maybe he knew how easily I could leave now that I had a license. What I kept to myself was that I questioned the importance of finishing school since I didn’t plan on going to college. I refused to be a dropout, but I didn’t want to sell out, either. Real writers didn’t go to college. I wasn’t sure where I’d heard that, but it sounded right.

“And what about this