I want to take Nonna to Miller’s Bottom, to a low flat ground outside Harshbarger Mills where people buy and sell everything, where money changes hands like water and hard cash is plunked down for junk. That’s where I want to take her, but my sister- in -law isn’t sure if she wants to go. She laughs at me as she wrings out a dishcloth, telling me I must have been to heaven. I throw up my hands.

            I lean against the door frame that connects the kitchen to the T.V. room where my husband, Jim, and Lucky are watching a ball game. The men excused themselves after dinner, and Nonna and I have finished in the kitchen. Now she is wiping down the cabinets, but I don’t help for two reasons: she likes to do this, and I don’t see the point.

            I watch Nonna. I’ve just painted a picture of prosperity, a bright dream hanging from the ceiling, and Nonna walks through it with a blue dishcloth in her hand, tearing that world apart.

            My niece, Lilyanne, sits at the kitchen table, her knees drawn up beneath her chin. Lilyanne hasn’t moved a muscle since I started talking about the flea market, but her feet are pressed so hard against the chair’s bottom that her toes have turned white.  She badly wants to go. Lilyanne has seen the dream I fashioned and knows her mother is approaching it in the same way she approaches all of life’s wonders — with suspicion and reserve.

            “I don’t know,” Nonna says again, scrubbing at a purple stain that’s been on her countertop for the last fifteen years. I should know as my son, Billy, spilled grape juice when his tuppercup overturned and stained it permanently. Even so, Nonna has never stopped trying. “I can’t imagine.”

            “Everything I have told you is true.” My voice is sharper than it should be. “Just last Saturday I saw an old woman get three hundred dollars for a ragged quilt. It was dirty, too.”

            “Shut the front door,” says Nonna. 

            “It’s true.” I tap my foot.

            Actually, the woman hadn’t been that old, and she was selling tomatoes. But if the lie fits, why change it? Ever since I saw that woman bagging produce, bra straps interfering with every move, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about my sister-in-law. Life hasn’t been easy for Nonna. In the first place, she is married to my brother, Lucky, who’s been a pill from day one, and I can only imagine the stuff he’s put her through over the years. Some of his escapades the family knows about, but not from Nonna. I’ve never heard her say one word against my brother. Me? I’d file.

            Nonna hasn’t had a nickel to call her own since she married my brother, but if she did, she wouldn’t waste it. As I watched the woman rake in cash for vegetables, I knew it would be spent on beer, cigarettes and fast food. But Nonna could handle money if Lucky would ever loosen the purse strings. She’d be able to give an account of every cent.

          Money, by my lights, means independence. I own my own beauty shop, called Hair’s the Place on Main Street and have most of the business in Harshbarger Mills. But that’s me. Nonna has been waiting close to eighteen years to decorate the house Lucky built on Kill Creek, although he’d promised her one in in town. The closest she’s come to satisfying her desires is a white oak gun case, a leather recliner, and a huge, flat screen which Lucky watches every night. My brother is one of the most self- centered people I know; marriage to a good woman only honed his worst tendencies. 

My brother’s name is not really Lucky, but Rowan Lee Cameron, Jr. Daddy called him Lucky from the moment of his birth because, after three girls, he said he was lucky to have a boy. The fact that mother went on to produce two more male children, Stevie and Frank, didn’t affect Lucky’s charmed existence one bit. He started smoking when he was fourteen, at first on the side porch, then in the house, and rubbed ashes in the carpet when he was on the phone. Lucky has always paced. Besides the ashes, he wore out the carpet in the hall. I could forgive him that, as I’m up on the world and know about various afflictions (like the name for people who can’t sit still), if it weren’t for the Saturdays. When we were growing up, Judy, Cathy and I were assigned to clean the kitchen, and Lucky would think nothing of barging through the back door with his boots on, and we’d have to mop the floor all over again. I have never let him forget our frustration. I feel it’s my duty, as all my siblings have left the state, my parents are dead, and someone needs to remind him what he is — a snake who changes color without ever shedding its skin.

            Of course, it doesn’t matter. My comments roll off Lucky like water off a duck. He tells me I’m an overbearing female; I tell him he’s not the only one walking the face of this earth. The only good thing he’s ever done, greatly surprising the family, was marry Nonna, whose full name is Nonna Gaylene, a beautiful sound for a beautiful girl barely out of high school. She was quiet, then as now, with an abundance of tawny hair and tightly pored, flawless skin plus a churchy streak . We all hoped the church would turn Lucky around, especially after Daddy died, and for a while it seemed to do him good.

He got baptized in the Guyandotte River by Preacher Randy Phelps, a good old boy if there ever was one, who was converted while playing poker at The Golden Rail Bar with three state troopers. Jesus called after he drew to an inside straight. That’s his testimony. What he leaves out is what everybody knows: that he was cheating and was close to getting  his head bashed in by a three metal flashlights.  

What goes on at Church on the Creek Baptist is unbelievable. Whooping and hollering. It’s worse than television.

to be con’t.

Copyright Joan Spilman, 2023. All rights reserved.