scrap metal. "I'll cut the prices on my rocks," I said.
Lori paused and looked down. "I don't think that will be enough," she
said.
"I guess we can eat less," I said.
"We have before," Lori said. We did eat less. Once we lost our credit at
the commissary, we quickly ran out of food. Sometimes one of Dad's odd
jobs would come through, or he'd win some money gambling, and we'd
eat for a few days. Then the money would be gone and the refrigerator
would be empty again.
Before, whenever we were out of food, Dad was always there, full of
ideas and ingenuity. He'd find a can of tomatoes on the back of a shelf
that everyone else had missed, or he'd go off for an hour and come back
with an armful of vegetables—never telling us where he got them—and
whip up a stew. But now he began disappearing a lot.
"Where Dad?" Maureen asked all the time. She was a year and a half old,
and these were almost her first words.
"He's out finding us food and looking for work," I'd say. But I wondered
if he didn't really want to be around us unless he could provide for us. I
tried to never complain.
If we asked Mom about food—in a casual way, because we didn't want to
cause any trouble—she'd simply shrug and say she couldn't make
something out of nothing. We kids usually kept our hunger to ourselves,
but we were always thinking of food and how to get our hands on it.
During recess at school, I'd slip back into the classroom and find
something in some other kid's lunch bag that wouldn't be missed—a
package of crackers, an apple—and I'd gulp it down so quickly I would
barely be able to taste it. If I was playing in a friend's yard, I'd ask if I