Free Altar by Philip Fracassi Page A

got into the act — a snarl of her lips and a crease in her cheek and forehead, her eyelids squeezed together in a passionate, overlapping embrace of lashes.
    Gary loved that wink, and it always made him smile. It was the one Abby always gave him when things seemed bad but always ended up okay. The one that said: “Don’t forget, don’t worry. We’re in this together.”
     
     
     
    They arrived at the pool.
    Martha dropped down the rear gate of the wagon and grabbed a large canvas bag filled with towels, sunscreen, snacks, and water bottles. Gary clutched his own towel and his blue swimming goggles tightly to his chest, waiting for Martha to hurry it up so he could slide out the back.
    “ Do you want your sandals?” Martha asked, grabbing a smaller mesh bag that carried Gary’s sandals, t-shirt and the tattered paperback she’d been reading for the last month. He saw a flash of something monstrous on the cover of the thick little book, its hateful black eyes staring out at him from within the dirty white crisscrossed plastic mesh of the bag. He hated that book and didn’t understand why his mother was reading it. He preferred Encyclopedia Brown himself, or his books about the nice fat lady, Ms. Piggle-Wiggle , who always knew the right things to do about bad, nasty children. In the last one he read she had made a boy stay locked inside his dirty room until, one day, the room was piled so high with filth and garbage that the boy was trapped, and he couldn’t eat or sleep or get out of the room and he likely would have died had he not realized, at the very end, that in order to survive he must be clean . So the boy cleaned everything up and never dirtied his room again. Gary thought that was a book worth reading.
    “Gary?” she said again, now holding his small flip-flops between her fingers, jostling them for his attention. “The pavement’s hot.”
    “Okay,” he said, just to keep things moving; anything to get out of the hot, stuffy wagon and into the cool, clear water. He slid his bottom onto the hard plastic shell of the dropped gate, sat patiently while Martha slipped the blue plastic sandals onto his feet. He could hear laughter and joyous screaming coming from just over the high brown-brick wall that separated the pool from the parking lot.
    His mother finally took a step back and allowed Gary to slip to the ground. Abby walked ahead, weaving carelessly between parked cars toward the black-glassed double-doors below the entry sign reading Akheron Community Center, a low-slung beige-bricked building that served as a portal to the recreation center sprawled beyond. He clutched his towel tightly and ran to catch up with her.
    “Watch for cars, please!” Martha yelled at his heels. “Even parked cars move sometimes, you know!”
    Abby turned, hearing the slaps of the sandals on pavement. She smiled vaguely, then turned back and kept walking. Gary could see the straps of her bikini through the sunlit white-and-green-striped cotton dress she had pulled over it. She also had on flip-flops, silly ones with sparkly stones all over them, and carried her own bag with things Gary couldn’t imagine needing at a pool. He knew what was in there because he snuck a look when they were waiting for her that morning.
    Sunscreen and a magazine made sense, but she also brought make-up and a hair brush, plus a couple other “girl” things he didn’t understand. A paper-wrapped tube, weird clips that he supposed were for her hair, and a small canister filled with pills he didn’t think were aspirin.
    He also thought it was a fake canister, that the pills were hidden. But he loved Abby, and would never tattle on her.
    When he caught up to her she absently dropped a hand down and grabbed his. He had to shuffle his goggles to his other hand quickly so as not to drop them, but he didn’t mind.
    “Stay with me and you’ll be safe,” she said, not looking down at him. He nodded and looked down to watch his feet cross