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 and tell her only what I know.

            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 the 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’ve  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.

            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’s married to my brother, Lucky, who has 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.  Nonna is god-fearing. She’d be able to give an account of every penny.  She was raised in Church on the Creek Baptist and is there every time the door opens.

            But back to money, which 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. The fact that not one of her decorating ideas has ever materialized isn’t her fault. 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 isn’t  Lucky, but Jesse Ray Nicholas, Jr. Daddy called him Lucky from the moment of his birth because, after having three girls, he said he was lucky to have a boy. The fact that mother went on to produce two more male children, Eugene and George, didn’t affect Lucky’s charmed existence one bit. He started smoking when he was fourteen, first on the  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 this, 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’ve 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. All my comments roll off Lucky like water off a duck. He tells me I am an overbearing female; I tell him he’s not the only one walking  the earth. The only good thing he’s ever done, greatly surprising the family, was marry Nonna, whose full name is Nonna Galene, a beautiful sound for a beautiful girl barely out of high school. She was quiet, then as now, with an abundance of tawny hair, tightly pored, flawless skin, and 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 who was converted while playing poker at The Golden Rail Bar with three state troopers. Randy said that when the Savior called, he’d answered, leaving behind his former life. That’s his testimony. What he leaves out is what everybody knows: that he was cheating and close to getting his head bashed in by metal flashlights.  That’s who baptized my brother.

The whooping and hollering that goes on there is unbelievable.  It’s worse than television.

           Lucky attended church long enough to get baptized, wear a tie, agree with Paul on the role of women without ever doing his part, and then got mad when the finance committee bought a second -hand bus, which Lucky roared was a waste of money and would break down in the first year. It did, and so he believed and still does that he was right on both counts: his interpretation of Ephesians: Chapter Five, and that  no one should buy a product from General Motors.

            Lyddie has been under his thumb right from the start. At first, she tried reason, but when she got pregnant, she stayed tired and swollen right from the start. She lost ground over the next three years, but at the time I don’t think it mattered. After Lilyanne was born, she concentrated on her daughter. My son is eight months older than my niece. As for Lucky, she clearly adored him for giving her someone she couldn’t have gotten by herself, but even love of divine creation has not been able to carry her for the last fifteen years. Can saints be martyrs? If so, she’s one of those, too.

            I must confess that my niece is a puzzle to me, as she is a combination of both, and considering my brother and Lyddie are so different, I expected Lilyanne to be one or the other. She loves her mother but tends to disregard her, and though she’d probably lay down her life for Lucky (and he for her), they can’t  be in the same room without ending up in a shouting match.

            Right now, Lilyanne is trying hard not to look bored during our adult conversation, but not only are her toes white, she has curled them under the rim of the chair.

            “I’m not calling you a liar, Lyddie,” says Nonna, pausing as she swipes at the ever-present stain, “but I just can’t see people paying good money for old stuff.”

            “It’s not old stuff,” I explain. “They call it Appalachian crafts. You’ll have to go down there and see how it works. The woman who sold that awful quilt got three hundred dollars,” I repeat, and then a sudden inspiration hits me. “You know what else she told me?”

            “You talked to her?” asks Nonna, her eyes wide.

            “It wasn’t exactly a conversation. It was after the couple who had bought the quilt walked off. She started laughing to herself, and I asked her what she was laughing about.”                   

      Nonna looks relieved that I have not talked to someone dirty without reason, and now I’m glad I lied. My story feels solid beneath me, and the woman’s name is now fixed in my mind as Edna.

            “Edna told me--er-- I did ask her name, Nonna, otherwise it would have been impolite.”

Lyddie nods and I continue, “That her youngest boy’s beagle bitch whelped on it. Thirteen pups.”

            Lyddie is so dumbfounded she stops her scrubbing and stands before the sink in what I call her ‘ten after six’ pose. She adopted this pose after she lost her right eye tooth. To disguise the gap, she developed a habit of putting her hand to her face while she talks out of the side of her mouth. She tilts her head slightly to the right, just where the minute hand of a clock would be, and that is why I think as I do. I’ve never voiced this observation, even to my husband, but I’m afraid someday I might blurt it out. I don’t know why Lyddie doesn’t have a bridge made; Lucky works for the railroad and has good insurance.