Cures for Hunger by Deni Béchard Page B

armored car in front of it.
    â€œYou see,” he said, “they bring the money on Friday. That’s when people get paid. They bring their paychecks, and the bank has to have lots of money for everyone.”
    I nodded, not sure why this mattered.
    Â 
    Â 
    As we were nearing home, I began talking again. I’d managed to stay quiet for most of the drive until my tongue began tapping back and forth against my teeth and prodding the roof of my mouth, which tickled. It needed to speak, and I’d been thinking about how my father didn’t like my mother’s spiritual ideas. I wondered how he felt about an all-powerful god staring down on him, knowing everything, even his adventures and other family.
    â€œDo you believe in God?” I asked.
    He shrugged. “Life’s a big joke. God’s playing a joke on us.”
    To me, this made it sound as if God was a bit like him. I asked if he prayed, and he said, “I hate church. I grew up with those fucking priests. I’d never go back.”
    â€œBut Bonnie said you see things sometimes.”
    â€œShe said what?”
    I repeated a story she’d told me. “One time,” she’d said, “he woke up and saw a bright white light above him, and he couldn’t move. He was paralyzed all night.”
    â€œShe told you that?” he shouted as we pulled into the driveway. I’d done it again. I’d talked too much.
    I cranked the door handle and dropped to the ground and clomped inside.

    My mother had just returned with my brother and sister, and they were watching a TV show about amazing people. My father loved Ripley’s Believe It or Not! and That’s Incredible! and he often called us in to explain what was being shown, the chain saw juggler or the parachuting escape artist. This time the host discussed the yogis of India, men who not only could stop their heartbeats but controlled every function of their bodies.
    â€œThis is the sort of stuff we talk about at the church,” my mother told us.
    I sensed my father’s interest, a lull in the anger he’d brought into the room. He sat shifted forward, as if he might learn something about this mysticism business.
    The host explained that to clean their intestines, yogis swallowed long strips of linen that they worked through their digestive tracts. The TV image switched to a small, mostly naked brown man who was feeding linen into his mouth, his Adam’s apple moving laboriously. He looked as if he were trying to eat a very large spaghetti noodle, and he rolled his belly with each gulp. The host said it took hours for the linen to reach the yogi’s intestines. Then the yogi would draw the linen back through his body. The last shot was of him pulling it from his mouth. He smiled as he held it out, black from its journey into his bowels.
    My father sat stock still, mouth open.
    â€œThat’s shit. That guy’s pulling shit out of his mouth. That’s disgusting!” He picked up the small black book he kept his business numbers in and hurled it at the TV.
    â€œGo to bed! All of you, go to bed!” he shouted. “That’s fucking disgusting!”
    Lying beneath the covers, I wondered what about the yogi had made him so angry. The little man’s actions hadn’t seemed magical at all, but rather like a difficult and time-consuming form of flossing, which I despised.
    Â 
    Â 
    Summer came and went, my mother and father rarely together, my brother and I reading and playing so much Dungeons & Dragons that we hardly noticed anything else. Then school started again, and we mourned the loss of our free time.

    Now everything was definitely changing. My mother and I sat in Baskin-Robbins, and as I ate my ice cream, she explained that she wouldn’t be with my father much longer. She said that she loved me and never wanted to leave me.
    â€œBut how do I know what I should do?” I asked and licked a run of melting