Patricia Q. Bidar
​

The Little Dress
 
My father’s cousin first visited on a Saturday night in summer. When my mother opened the door, she said, Hello Perry, and he bowed and handed her a macrame watchband of waxy threads, which he’d made while away. We kids were sitting around playing Crazy Eights, and he asked us how the game worked. He’d brought a bag of candy.

He told us about visiting Marine World when it first opened. How the big tank’s glass walls had cracked and collapsed, and he’d saved a baby. About meeting John F. Kennedy at Cape Canaveral. How as a teen at the Rose Parade he was mistaken for James Dean. Our mother stayed in the kitchen, just a few feet away. Our father’s cousin asked, could one of us kids loan him twenty bucks? My sister excused herself, saying had a friend coming over. The younger ones stayed silent, cards in hand.
 
Now, Perry, our mother called over from where she was cleaning out the refrigerator. Cut it out now, will you?
 
Like everyone on our father’s side, his cousin smelled like beer and sweat. He was younger and more handsome than our dad. One of his front teeth was crooked, and he had wavy golden hair. 
 
I had the money. It was a special feeling to know that, of all us kids, I was the one with twenty bucks. My 12th birthday has just passed. I also knew our mother was listening, and it made me feel good to be able to help. 
 
Our father’s cousin must have seen this in my eyes because he urged me more than once to go up and get that twenty. I’ll buy you a real cute dress, he kept saying. I’ll drop it off next weekend. What’s your size, sweetie? He didn’t stay long after I handed over the cash.
 
Late that night, I heard our mother crying as she related the whole thing to our father. She told him I’d given in so my father’s brother would stop pressing children for booze money. I had never heard my mother cry and the strained sound of it made my own eyes burn. 
 
Our father’s cousin had sworn he’d return and talk to us about better things; educational things. And of course, the dress. 
 
I listened from my bed to our father's non-answer that night as our mother wept and told him that his cousin had pestered the kids after she, our mother, had said no. How, to protect the others, I’d finally given in. The golden feeling of righteousness filled me, as if protecting my brothers had really motivated me, rather than the chance for something new to wear, given to me by a charming man. 
 
Both she and I waited. After a pause, he began talking about the long day he'd had at the shop and what a pain it had been driving home in traffic. How it must be nice to hang around all day playing with kids, warm inside the house.
 
Despite knowing better, I waited for that little dress to arrive. Maybe it would have a pleated skirt or come with a belt. Maybe it would be a micro mini; would I be allowed to wear it to school? Would it arrive with a photo of our charming relative grinning at a rodeo or film set or on a faraway beach, his pantlegs rolled up to clamdigger length. As months passed, that part of me worried he’d forgotten where we all were. That he wandered the neighborhood, season after season, a Contempo Casuals box under his arm, unable to find us again, or to imagine how much we’d learned since he’d been away.
 
**
 
La Señora
 
Hard-footed beach kids, we four kids bump and rattle in the back seat like beer empties. Sand coats the floor. We whine for Der Wienerschnitzel, demand Jack in the Box and Petone's Pizza and Pioneer Chicken. My brother starts the chant: "Stop at the liquor store! Stop at the liquor store! Stop at the liquor store!" and we don't give up. We want. Want Dr Pepper and candy. Chikko Sticks and Scrunch bars and Laffy Taffy. The urge to be filled filled filled; a buffer between us and the neighborhood moms, the popular kids at school. 
 
We're in the back of our mother's terrible Oldsmobile to the second-hand stores we call Retarded Children's and Damn Vets. Our hearts are pure. Our mother carries a tape measure in her purse, which is carpeted with loose tobacco and smell of Wrigley's Doublemint Gum. We chant so hard our mother's cigarette hand shakes. Every window is open to the hot wind. 
 
Our little brother, the cutest of us, hangs his head and shoulders out the window, chanting into the hot Los Angeles air. “Liquor store!” Our mother’s ashes fly out her window and into ours; into our eyes. We laugh and laugh. Anything to make her smile. Even alone with us kids, she raises her hand to hide discoloured teeth. 
 
Years later, in high school, I'm riding with a friend whose parents gifted her a car. I hunch down when we idle beside my mom’s Oldsmobile. You can still see the roof lining hanging down in the strips we yanked while yelling our demands. As a distraction, I rub my friend's arm, ask can we stop for cigarettes and cokes at the liquor store. I'll pay. To this day, I’m an inveterate check picker upper. 
 
After our father dies, our mother tells us the reason she finally got dentures was because our dad threatened to move to Mexico and abandon her if she didn’t. 
 
He was halfway packed when a massive stroke took him. He was playing blackjack at the Barona Valley Ranch Casino when it happened. She, across the vast and mazelike gaming floor, playing nickel slots. 
 
He deserved happiness, he’d been hollering at her on the ride over. A simple life beside the sea with a sweet señorita. Fishing. A striped hammock. A donkey to take him where he wants to go.
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Much later, she told me she’d walked past him and the paramedics that day; simply returned to their car. Took the scenic ride home, with that view of velvety Palomar Mountain. When she got the call from the casino medic, she was eating frozen yogurt in the car, AC blasting.
 
**
 
This poem originally appeared in Revolution John.
 
**
 
Birdsong
 
Sure, your father and I got along — he always got his way. He’d come home in that noisy El Camino to inform me he’d traded our house for another. Or taken out a loan on another fixer. Or taken over some woman’s mortgage. He never explained. And then we were moving to Los Angeles. We were moving to Phoenix. Then here to San Diego. Let me turn the TV down, so we can visit.
 
The president makes you anxious, you say. You take pills. Your Ukranian doctor made fun of your worry and you got into a snit. But you don’t remember Chernobyl. Or Nixon. The Cuban Missile Crisis.
 
When Reagan came in, we flew to New Zealand. Your father swore we’d move for good. New Zealand or Costa Rica. But it was just like all of our trips. He fished and I read in our room. 
 
We flew back a week apart, so he could check out the real estate scene without distraction. I drove along five hours to the airport. Witnessed reunions big and small. Loud and showy, or church-like in silence. A parade of emotion! Wives entwined with husbands. Children knocking suitcases down. Sweethearts. I made myself stare.
 
When we visit your Aunt Lizzy, don’t mention the president! You know about her politics, her temper. Your uncle, the one with the waxed mustache, died without a cent in Texas. He mortified her by requesting sentimental songs from the mariachis. Lizzy claimed he abused her. She tried to smother me when I was a baby. 
 
Yes, I have friends! But they refuse to go out without their husbands. After you kids all moved out, your father and I lived in this house for four years. I don’t know what he did. Whatever he wanted. I was working. 
 
He died bringing in a yellowtail. A stranger attempted CPR. He was alive when they lifted him into the helicopter, the captain said.
 
The day after he went, I had to ride in a taxi alone to retrieve his Firebird. The hardest thing was telling the parking lot attendant I was picking up my dead husband’s muscle car.
 
No. The real hardest part is remembering the homey sounds from early that morning. Him, fixing himself instant oatmeal. I listened to his careful walk. Opening and shutting the refrigerator door. Stopping the microwave before it dinged. 
 
I could have gotten up to say goodbye. I wish I did. It's the clink of his spoon against his bowl I remember. 
 
I hear it now, above the sound of the birdsong and the cheers of the television audience.   
 
**
 
This first appeared in Flash Boulevard.
 
**
 
Mother’s Day
 
My daughter, 
 
I’m writing this letter to you on Mother’s Day. An assignment of sorts. Capable hands care for me. Musical speech provides the backdrop to my days. Tagalog, the language is called, but you would know that. I had to ask. One nurse in particular, she’ll talk to me. Nurse Carmela is the one who said it’s time to write you a letter. She serves as my amanuensis as well as my carer. She even brought the stationery. White with sweet yellow roses. Do you remember how in the old days, motels had a little drawer with a few sheets of stationery, an envelope or two? Or maybe you were born too late for that.
 
Here are the words Carmela writes at my request with her teal-inked pen: "Place me on a mountaintop. A sky burial in a tower of silence. Let the elements first take me, then the carrion birds." She looks sideways at me to see if I’m joking. She says these words are probably against her religion and the rest is up to me. 
 
I was born in 1940; you, in 1976. Dragons, according to the Chinese zodiac. A community of two all those years. A clutch, a nest. No father, no brother, or swarm of sticky cousins. No Easter Egg hunts or barbeques or sprawling Christmas Eves. Our apartment rang with silence. You were a future butterfly, counting the days. A pupa. We stayed curled around our books. Later, you forayed into other families, the families of your friends, but it was always temporary. Until you turned 18 and left. Just as I did at the same age. I was left with your dog, your birds, your butterfly garden. The monarchs are drawn to the milkweed in pots on the balcony.
 
Carmela’s children are at home while she works. Twin aunties care for them. Her family all live within one mile of one another; imagine! Later today they will gather to honor all the mothers.
 
One more time, I would like to regard the Pacific Ocean, a constant my entire life. Like a heaving green plain. Here, I am close enough to catch the marine scent on the morning wind. Carmella knows I like my window wide to the elements. Some birdsong. A butterfly, higher than high as the song goes, the one that will always remind me of you. You left like a butterfly, guided by your cells.
 
But we are not flutterers, you and I. Only scaly and strategic. I regard you from across three thousand miles, across the purple mountain’s majesty, the amber waves of cranes. Carmella suggested adding that part. 
 
I will not really be pedestaled on a mountaintop to be devoured by birds. I am no Zoroastrian. I trust Carmela to handle it all and to take away my earthly possessions, as she has agreed. But do think of me as you regard your mountains, so very far from here. Or the surging Atlantic. The coconut palms. Or steel cylinders scraping heaven. Whatever you have, where you live.
 
From one dragon to another,
Mother
 
**
 
This first appeared in Palisades Review.
 
**
 
Patricia Quintana Bidar is a western writer from the Port of Los Angeles area. Her work has been published in journals including Wigleaf, Smokelong Quarterly, The Pinch, Atticus Review, and Variant Lit and widely anthologized, including in Flash Fiction America (W.W. Norton), Best Small Fictions 2023 and 2024 (Alternating Current), and Best Microfiction2023 (Pelekinesis Press). Patricia's novelette, Wild Plums (ELJ Press) was published in 2024. Her collection of short works, Pardon Me For Moonwalking, is coming in December 2025 from Unsolicited Press. See patriciaqbidar.com for more.