Page 13 of It's Always Sonny

“Funny you should ask,” Sienna answers. “The Mediterranean cruise is off.”

“What do you mean, the cruise is off?” Gabe asks.

“Aunt Elaine called yesterday. Turns out we have to go somewhere within driving distance of Nonna’s place in Virginia.”

“Huh?” I ask. Nonna is a travel junky, and like so many octogenarians, cruises are her drug of choice.

“Yeah, so it turns out that Nonna got into a fight with an airline during her Christmas cruise that she didn’t tell us about, and our travel guide called Aunt Elaine yesterday to say that Nonna isn’t allowed to fly.”

Gabe and I look at each other. “Nonna got banned from an airline? What happened?”

I point to a drive-thru and Gabe nods, turning in to Cook Out. We get in the long line and wait. And listen raptly.

The story is classic Nonna.

My grandmother and her sister, my Great Aunt Mary, were sitting in their row on the plane next to a man of a similar age. The man was cranky and looked out the window the whole time, making judgmental noises while Nonna and Great Aunt Mary talked. When they cracked open some homemade biscotti and offered him some, the man wailed about how he was allergic to nuts and were they trying to kill him. He called the attendant, and Nonna and her sister were asked to stow their biscotti for passenger safety. Nonna pointed out that the airline had given out peanuts not a half hour earlier, and the man hadn’t cried then, but they just asked her to stow the biscotti again.

As the flight progressed, the man had more and more complaints. My ninety-eight pound Nonna was taking up too much space. She was too loud for him to hear his movie through his headphones. Hours into the flight, he tapped her shoulder and told her he needed to use the restroom. But Nonna was in the middle of telling Great Aunt Mary a story and told the man to wait a second. He wasn’t hearing that. He told her to stand, now, and she held up a finger to tell him to wait.

Yes, that finger.

The man started yelling and insisted that he needed to use the bathroom now, and she said that if it was so urgent, why hadn’t he stood up before she started the story? He told her that, considering she hadn’t shut up in over four hours, he’d been waiting for her to take a breath, and this was his first opportunity.

She threw her drink at him.

And that’s when the flight attendant walked by.

“So she got in trouble with the airline?” I laugh. We’re still three cars from ordering.

“Not just the airline.”

“You don’t mean …”

“Let me finish,” Sienna says.

When the flight attendant told Nonna to stop or they’d have a sky marshal restrain her, she didn’t take it well. She told them that they were taking a man’s side and it’s always the woman who’s the crazy one, but had anyone heard the whining on this guy? The woman in front of them held her hand up, and Nonna gave her a high five, but the motion was awkward and she …

“She sort of elbowed the man in the face.”

Laughter explodes from Gabe and me.

“That’s not all,” Sienna says, struggling not to laugh.

The man started yelling, grabbing his eye, saying she was trying to kill him, and the flight attendant asked the sky marshal to step in. He traded seats with Great Aunt Mary and sat between the two the rest of the flight. But as they disembarked, the sky marshal took them both into the aisle.

And Nonna tripped him.

“Was it an accident?” I ask, laughing so hard, tears are streaming down my face.

“Of course it wasn’t an accident,” Gabe says, his shoulders shaking from trying to control himself. “Have you met Nonna?”

Sienna’s breathy laugh fills the car. “You didn’t hear the rest!”

When the man fell, his head hit on the seat across the aisle, and he got knocked out.

Nonna was escorted off the plane in handcuffs.

And she was labeled a “threat to global aviation safety.”

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