Free Cures for Hunger by Deni Béchard

stopped on the roadside, one foot on the ground as she watched, her head thrust forward, eyes full of fear for us, dark and wide and flashing with refracted light as our van drove by.
    I took a breath and stared out. I made myself stop thinking and just looked at everything. I was seeing all this for later, for the rest of my life. I knew this with an unmoving wisdom that made me feel that someday I would indeed be someone else.
    And then I was no longer in my seat, in the van, but on the mountain where my father had once taken me. I could see the entire valley, its fields and streams, the curve of the road whose presence alone, each day after school, gave me a sense of certainty. It descended past wet rocks and old, gaunt trees, then leveled and turned and gave onto the straightaway. Past a few farms and the fields of Christmas trees or sod,
it rose back along the mountains and returned to where it entered, beyond rock faces lit with quick, brittle streams.
    Just outside was a service station where carpooling parents waited. If we turned right, we headed to my school in Abbotsford or to Vancouver. Left led toward Nicomen Island, that piece of muddy earth where my father got his mail and where I was born.
    Mountains stood against the distance, larger and whiter than those of the valley, the flat, humid, windy ranges washed down from them over millennia and called prairies by those who’d chosen to stay. This was the shape of the world. As a child, I could have drawn it with a crayon: that damp sheet of alluvial land hemmed in by the horizon.
    And now we were gone.

PRAYERS, MANTRAS, AND HOW TO SWEAR
    On the paper there was a tree, the trunk split in two, and each of those branches split in two, and so on. At the top were the words arbre genéologique, and at the trunk and each fork stood empty boxes. I’d been trying to act normal, but I couldn’t stop yawning, and now there was this. Other kids were filling in the boxes. I couldn’t concentrate. It had taken me a while even to write my own name on the trunk. In the two boxes on the branches above, I printed Bonnie and André. But the highest boxes were the problem. Mrs. Hand told me to write the names of my grandparents—“your father’s father and mother.” When I said, “ Je ne les connais pas, ” she said, “ Ta grand-maman et ton grand-papa? ” as if I hadn’t understood. But I couldn’t even remember the names of my mother’s parents. My head hurt. I’d met them once, years before, but no memories remained. Mrs. Hand told me to take the sheet home and fill it in, but I forgot and accidentally sat on it for hours while reading a novel. The next day I got an F+.
    Normally, when I had really bad grades, my mother marched into school and grilled my teacher. Sometimes this embarrassed me, and sometimes it was fun to watch. But when I showed her this grade, she just sighed. Even I was too exhausted to ask the usual questions about why I was the only kid who didn’t know anything about his father’s family.
    The boredom of school stretched out beneath an overcast sky. How was it possible to survive twelve years? Without my father, life became as silent and tense as a classroom during a math quiz—no driving fast, no stories about bruisers and close calls. Just thinking about him
made my heart speed up—its throbbing in my chest, its slippery bumping against my ribs like a panicked frog in my fingers.
    I was sure I’d never see him again, but then, four days after my mother took us to the new house, I woke to find him eating breakfast, my mother silently preparing our lunches on the counter. He just said, “Hi” and smiled. His empty suitcases were in her room, so he must have come in the night. I sat across from him, and he told me about a lobster at his fish store that was the size of my arm, and how he’d saved it so we could eat it together. I asked if maybe it was