Free Altar by Philip Fracassi

 
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    Gary stared anxiously through the humidity-smeared rear window of the station wagon. The grill of the white Cadillac trailing behind them twinkled in the heat, the chrome glinting like a metal mouth bearing down on the rear bumper every time the brakes squealed them to a stop. Gary stared absently at two shadowy figures, blackened and hazy, hovering behind the Caddy’s sloping windshield like strange voyeurs from another world, a world in which things like air-conditioning and tinted windows proliferated.
    Martha had a tendency to brake hard and turn hard, forcing Gary to use the palms of his hands to balance himself against the hot plastic of the car interior with every change in direction, digging the heels of his bare feet into the rough fabric of the wagon’s rear bed at every all-too-brief red light. To make things worse, Gary wore nothing but a swimsuit, and the sun coming through the large wagon windows was sliding across his skin in slanted hot white quadrangles, smearing like hot butter across his small frame with every twist of the road. He felt like a bug trapped under the concentrated bright eye of a magnifying glass.
    Despite the front windows being down there was little ventilation in the rear, and though the ride was short his skin was already moist with sweat. Particularly annoying was the purple sugar spilled across his chest and the back of his hand from the ripped-open pouch of Lik-M-Aid Fun Dip, which had coughed out a puff of powder when Martha barreled over a particularly large pothole. The crashing bump had briefly levitated him before slamming him down against the wide floor of the wagon’s rear hold, making him bite his tongue while simultaneously creating the Fun Dip fiasco he was currently saddled with.
    “Sorry!” Martha said, floating a hand in the air without turning her head. Then to herself, “Been more and more of those lately... damn roads.”
    “Mom, god,” snapped Abby, her voice chiding but her eyes never leaving the notebook where she was scribbling love letters in bright green ink to Timmy Northrup, her teenage crush. “You made me mess up,” she mumbled.
    “Sorry,” Martha repeated, her tone more weary than sorrowful. “Didn’t see it.”
    Abby turned her head absently toward the rear of the wagon and caught Gary’s eye. She smiled, her expression one of amused surprise, as if he had just now come into existence.
    She lifted a hand to her mouth, pantomiming a cup, and pretended to drink from it. She followed this with a cross-eyed look and a wobbling of her head. Gary knew she was pretending to be drunk, and almost laughed, but when he shifted his eyes to the back of his mom’s head his smile disappeared. His mother did drink. He knew that sometimes she drank a lot. It was one of the reasons their father had left them, at least according to Abby.
    He looked back at the still-smiling Abby, and as the sun hit her face, he thought for the millionth time how very pretty she was. She had black hair and blue eyes like he did, like their mother, but her complexion was more olive, like their father’s. Gary knew boys thought she was cute — enough of his friends had told him so — and he certainly held no argument with it. He wished he was more like her, and often imitated her expressions, her mannerisms, in the hopes of being thought of as highly as she was by other kids. But he was small, he knew, and thin, and paler than she. He was skinny and boney like his mother, who they called Martha at her request but never felt right about it. Martha was quite pale, quite thin, having become more so since their father left. But she, also, was quite beautiful. He knew that. He knew she had been.
    Abby snapped her fingers, bringing Gary back. He looked into her eyes, tried to smile. She returned his smile and then she gave him “the wink.” The Wink wasn’t a quick, darting wink, but a heavy, prolonged, wink — the kind where her whole face