AUGUST | Fiction by Patricia Q. Bidar

When my father left us to live with my fifth-grade teacher over in Navy Housing, my mother’s hands changed. They’d always been rough and dry, bare nails cut straight square. Now that she’d begun working, she visited a salon every two weeks. A pink bottle of Rose Milk lotion stayed on her bedside table. She needed to attend to herself as if she was a product on a shelf, she explained to me.

That blazing Los Angeles August, I was in charge of fixing lunch for my older cousin, Ernesto. A bologna sandwich, a handful of Fritos, and a Mountain Dew on the rocks. I’d fix it for him, and we’d eat together on the concrete patio just outside the slider. Ernesto’s job was to bushwhack our backyard. My mother was making a fresh start in our same old block of tradesmen, dyed green lawns, crisp U.S. flags, and America, Love it or Leave It bumper stickers. She came home late after Happy Hour one time with her co-workers, spinning a vision of our backyard as a healing oasis. Hibiscus and juniper and bottlebrush. A clean glass table with a yellow and white striped umbrella. She’d have the neighborhood ladies over for brunch. Make new friends. Tell her side of things. And how she was just glad I’d be at the middle school come September, and not back at Taper Elementary with “that woman.”

Evenings, I’d lie leg to leg beside Ernesto on the unfurled Hide-a-Bed, watching television. He had a sparse but black mustache. T-shirts that said, Let’s Boogie. Keep on Truckin‘. Gas, Grass or Ass: Nobody Rides for Free, which made me laugh. Ernesto had good manners, something my mother kept saying surprised her. I liked having him at the dinner table, where he’d tell us about the things he and his friends did back home. Volunteered at an old folks’ home in Torrance, where he played the guitar and sang The House of the Rising Sun. The arcade at the Del Amo mall. Again, there were three plates at the dinner table. With Ernesto added in, our family size retained its size, but with a cool update.

I wanted my cousin to know I was not a kid. Yes, I was aware that I wasn’t a teenager who smoked and played the guitar, or an adult who worked all day before stopping at the Rose Room for happy hour, and who let their face drop into a mask of sadness when home.

I wanted to tell Ernesto I’d gone to a friend’s and in her older brother’s bedroom, the blacklight had illuminated our bras under our t-shirts. My face grew hot, imagining saying “bra” to him. Of course, it was only a story one of the Carries at school told.

I started to say, I’m 12 tomorrow! But I stopped myself, savoring the secret of it. Ernesto would see the next night at dinner. My mom would fix something special. He and I could share an amused look when she sang so terribly.

I mean, I so wanted those small blessings in the August evening with the sky still light. And then much later, I wanted that feeling in the late night’s middle awakening in bed with no need to get up for anything, had only to move more deeply into sleep amidst the foghorn sounds from the harbor and the mournful sound of the train. My mother across the hall, curled on her new waterbed, her bedroom walls a girly lilac. My cousin downstairs, bunked down in the hide-a-bed. The television, still warm, and our cockatiel Toulouse, rustling softly in his beach towel-covered cage.

I know it doesn’t sound like a lot, but it was the way I needed this birthday to go.

The next day, I brought Ernesto his sandwich and drink as usual. I could smell the lemon kitchen soap on his hands. I’d spent the morning cutting my jeans off into shorts. But in going back and forth to even them out, they’d grown shorter and shorter. I had those on, and a t-shirt of my dad’s. No shoes.

“You should get a halter top to wear with those,” Ernesto said before taking a bite.

“Not a lot to haul,” I said, shocked at my own words. I wasn’t wearing my bra, but the shirt was so loose, I didn’t think it mattered.

“Good one! And you have plenty for your age. You’ve got a tight little bod,” he offered. “Why not show it off?”

This was teenage talk. This was a story I could polish up and repeat at school. I’d make sure the Carries heard. I excused myself. In my bedroom, I threw my father’s shirt to the carpet. Stepped out of my shorts. I began to dance, slowly at first. I imagined what Ernesto would say if he saw me, dancing for him in just my underpants. Then I took those off, too. When I heard the front door slam, I quickly dressed.

My mother was in the kitchen, muttering about triplicates and signatories as she fixed herself a scotch mist. Still in her work clothes and shoes, she put on the big pot of water for pasta. It was what we always had on Thursday nights.

I’d changed into a sleeveless t-shirt from last summer. Tight. Ernesto came to the table in a new-looking shirt that said, Bring The G.I.s Home NOW. He asked, as he always did, if there was anything he could do to help. My mother placed a plate of cut-up cantaloupe on the table. She looked from one to the other of us.

Then she squinted at me with a peculiar expression. “Are you wearing lip gloss?” Ernesto chuckled. “What’s funny, little boy?” I couldn’t look at him. I was the only one who saw her pale pink fake fingernail resting on a slice of cantaloupe.

The smoke alarm began to blare. This had been a small joke between my parents in better times. “Mom’s home cookin’!” my dad would quip, and she’d crack up, making like she was going to smack him.

Ernesto shot up, making his chair wobble. “What’s happening now?”

Until that instant, I still believed someone would shout out, Happy Birthday! And in that instant, I glimpsed the little boy my cousin had been before he became the teenager who had told my mother and me about visiting his local head shop, an older buddy of his having let him into the space after hours, and even through the blue velvet curtain into the room where the hookahs and bongs were kept, all lit from below. My mother ignored Ernesto. She huffed into the kitchen to turn off the stove.

“It’s only smoke from the cheese,” I explained. I wished Ernesto would go after her so I could remove that fake fingernail from the paper plate of cantaloupe.

But just then, my mother burst from the kitchen with my father’s hammer in her hand. Ignoring us, she climbed onto her chair and began bashing at the alarm casing, emitting furious grunts. Pieces of plastic were flying.

I tried to think of something to say. Before he fled the room, I saw the fear in Ernesto’s eyes.

Today, you hear the word “trigger,” and people pretty much know what you’re talking about. I may have loved Ernesto, but it never crossed my mind back then that he’d gone through things at home with my aunt, and that maybe that was part of the reason he was there with us that summer. But I was just freshly 12, my father was gone, and my mother had transformed into a person I didn’t know.

The sound of a basketball game blasted from the TV room. The smoke alarm, the pounding hammer, rang as I piled my plate with cantaloupe. The sound of my own chewing and swallowing filled my ears. But I couldn’t muffle the sound of those grunts, the sight of those pantyhose-encased legs.

Finally, my mother descended. “My fucking sister thinks she can dump that belligerent hippie on me? Well, she’s getting him back,” she told me.

The next morning while Ernesto was showering, she piled charcoal briquettes in the barbecue, squirted every item of his clothing with starter fluid, and got the flame going.

An hour later, Ernesto was ascending the bus steps in our father’s boy scout leader uniform, the only clothing he had left behind.

I watched from the hot car as Ernesto took a window seat in the middle of the bus. He sat very straight. He did not look at me and wave as I fervently hoped he would. My mother slouched before the steering wheel. I smelled her pit sweat.

My father wasn’t even that far from our house. Just two blocks away. But he’d added himself to another family and subtracted himself from ours. And now my mother and I were down again to the silent duo we stayed during all my school years, holidays, and graduations. Every marker and goodbye.

Beginning with this one, with the bus pulling out and heading slowly down Main Street toward the west end of town and the interstate.

By Thanksgiving, my mom had stopped going to the salon. But went to more Happy Hours, sometimes alone. Yellow weeds again choked our backyard. But it didn’t really matter. No one ever went out there anymore.

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