Free Captain Quad by Sean Costello

and flipped it open. He'd passed the tenth grade with flying colors, and despite herself Leona felt a faint glow of pride for the kid. He'd had to work hard at it, too, burning the midnight oil most nights. Poor Sammy, he was most definitely not a talented boy. He couldn't draw, couldn't use a hammer without blackening a thumbnail, couldn't even put out the garbage without busting the bag. The only thing he could do was play hockey, and Leona could see little of value in that. In spite of his gangly clumsiness, on skates the kid underwent a mysterious transformation, a change so striking that even Leona had to acknowledge it. The one time she'd gone out to watch him play—a Bantam game about two years ago—his coach had proudly informed her that her son was going to be the next Wayne Gretzky.
    Now there was a good one.
    No, Sammy was not like his brother. For Peter the grades had always come easily, like the music and everything else. But what Sammy lacked in brains he made up for in determination; she had to give him that. He was out there right now, slinging cold cuts at the Sandwich King restaurant.
    Gonna be a doctor. . .
    Leona chuckled ruefully. For a while she let her son's music lap soothingly over her. When the tape was done, she got up and changed clothes, after digging the appropriate garments out of mothballs. Then she called a cab.
    Dwindling finances, most of which Leona had guzzled in one form or another, had forced her and Sammy to give up their small house on Colby Street and move into a tenth-floor apartment in the rent-geared-to-income complex on Lorne. Thinking of it—that hypocritical term, "rent-geared-to-income"—tugged another bitter chuckle from Leona. A slum by any other name. Overrun with snot-nosed kids, their pets, and their fat single mothers, the place was a twenty-story embarrassment. But with the pittance she got from the government, it was all she could afford. She hadn't worked in over a year, and she had no intention of starting now. At least the money she'd gotten from the sale of the house had covered her debts, with a little left over for security.
    The buzzer sounded. It was the cabbie.
    Leona pulled on a sweater, locked the apartment door, and took the elevator to the lobby.
    "The Whipple Tree on Regent," she said as she climbed into the diesel Volvo. "And stop at the LCBO."
    A misty rain was falling, dragging down with it the sulfurous reek of the smokestacks. Sneezing, Leona eyed the stacks with vague disdain. No matter what your vantage in the city, you could always see the stacks, bristling on the horizon like enormous blunt quills. They were steadily spewing eyesores. . . but each time she saw them, like a hundred-hundred other things, they put her in mind of her boy. The way he was. He'd worked his summers at Nickel Ridge, earning money for college.
    Leona got out at the Liquor Control Board on Regent Street and came back with a forty-ouncer of Jack. At the Whipple Tree she bailed out again and disappeared into the shop. A few minutes later she was back, clutching her purchase to her chest. Seeing her coming, the driver climbed out to assist her. Whatever she'd bought, it was too bulky for the backseat, so he helped her stow it in the trunk.
    "University Hospital," Leona said once they were mobile again. "And step on it."
    The cabbie called in his destination, noticing a glassy flash in the rearview mirror as his fare raised a bottle to her lips.

    The gruel they'd fed him for supper lay in a clotted lump in Peter's gut. A full year here and still he couldn't stomach the grub. Thank God for Sam. Three or four times a week the kid brought him a sackful of real food—barbecued ribs from Casey's, buckets of Chinese from the Peking Gazebo, spicy pasta from the Vesta Café, and more recently, heaped roast beef sandwiches from the Sandwich King, where Sam had a job for the summer.
    Without Sam, Peter reflected, life would be twice the misery it already was. Relatives, friends—he