Broncs&Boots: You sure about this, Emmie?

HalfpipeEmms: Yep.

Step one: Assemble your team. Check.

Step two: Gear up.

This one’s complicated. I still have that money Nonny gave me for a “suitable dress” sitting in my top drawer, and she’s supposed to come over around noon to drive us to town to pick one out, but I have a little something different in mind.

When Nonny arrives to pick me up, I’ve got the sewing machine set up on the kitchen table and one of Mom’s costume dresses on the chair beside it. When I tell Nonny what I want to do, her first reaction is disapproval. I expected that, and I don’t budge.

“This is what I want to wear, Nonny,” I tell her. Then, because desperate times, I pull out the zinger. “I want to feel close to Mom tomorrow.”

An unfair move maybe, but it works. Nonny closes her mouth mid-protest and sighs. I suddenly realize how much older she looks than she did two years ago. She slowly picks up Mom’s dress and runs her fingers along the carefully shredded green fabric on the bodice.

“What was this even supposed to be?”

“A forest fairy,” I tell her.

Nonny chuckles. “I always did wonder why God sent a girl like her to a woman like me,” she says. “I wish you’d known your mother when she was your age, Emelyn. She’d come home with a stack of books so high she could barely see over them, then burrow up in some corner and disappear into them. Always asking things, coming up with ideas I’d never even heard of, much less knew how to answer. Brain like a bag of sparks, that’s what your granddaddy always said.”

“He was proud of her,” I say. Pop-Pop and Mom never tangled like she and Nonny did.

“Of course he was,” Nonny says sharply. She pulls off her glasses and rubs her eyes. “So was I. So proud of that girl. I was just afraid of what the world would do to a soul like that. I always tried to reel her back down to reality. Remind her she was a Carolina country girl to pull her head out of those clouds a bit. But she always said reality was nothing but location times imagination.”

I’ve never heard Nonny talk this way before. I don’t know that I will again anytime soon, because she swipes at her eyes once and shoves her glasses back on. Then she catches up the dress in one hand and a pair of scissors in the other.

“All right,” she says, her voice jam-full of that same steel I used to hear in Mom’s now and then. “So, we need to make this raggedy thing fit you properly?”

When we’ve finished, Mom’s dress fits me perfectly. We leave the sleeves and skirt a bit long, enough fabric to drape over my elbows and knees, and even Nonny can’t keep the disapproving look on her face when I try it on.