At 6:30, mid-way through the Pennsylvania Turnpike, they stopped for dinner of hamburgers and Cokes, to use the toilet and ‘fill up’.

On the road again, Marsha sat with her back against the door, with her legs folded beneath her at a left angle. Mitchell drove with his left hand on the steering-wheel, with his right hand as high beneath the cuff of Marsha’s jeans as possible and, as tired as he was, holding her calf, he had an urge to move his hand past the crook of her knee, to feel the smoothness of Marsha’s inner thigh... and the moist warmth beyond.

“Mitchie,” seeing his weariness, sensing his rising passion, attempting to keep him entertained with a stream of humorous chatter, “did I ever tell you about when my uncle Willie was in the Marines?”

Mitchell glanced at his wife. Rhea’s brother, Marsha’s uncle Melvin, so she had told him, was a ‘bookie’: a taker of illegal betting, and Eli’s younger brother, Marsha’s uncle Bill, or ‘Uncle Willie’ as she called him, was a ‘fence’: one who buys and sells ‘hot’ merchandise.

Mitchell sometimes wondered about the family he’d married into: A mother who was, so her daughter had told him, a prostitute; an uncle that was a bookie, another that’s a fence, so... “Willie? A Marine?” he asked disbelievingly.

Laughing, “For three years, when I was five, six and seven, Mother and Daddy told me that Uncle Willie was in the Marines, and every once in a while, on a Sunday, Daddy would borrow Uncle Harry’s car and Mother, Daddy, Bubby Goldman and me would drive all the way out to the Marine base... “

“ ‘Marine base’?”

“Yeah. But I could never understand why the guards at the gate always searched us and looked through the picnic basket.”

Mitchell liked Marsha’s uncle. After all, it was Bill that had given them this very same car they were driving as a wedding gift. But knowing him, and of him, he did not quite believe that ‘Uncle Willie’ could ever be a Marine, or for that matter even be in the Army... But then again, thinking, Who knows? “Well, Marcie,” he said, rather stupidly, “maybe it was a secrete base, and things there were, you know, kind of secret there.”

Her hand on his atop the material of her jeans, “Yeah, but they only searched us when we came in and I could never understand why guards walked around the walls with rifles, and I especially wondered why Uncle Willie never came to visit us.”

Catching on, “Marcie, where was this, uh, Marine base?”

“When I first started to read,” Marsha went on, “Mother and Daddy made up a game and told me to close my eyes when we got close to the gate, and when I did learn to read and could read what it said over the gate, they stopped taking me when they went to visit Uncle Willie.” Stopping, she waited for him to ask...

“What did it say over the gate?”

“ ‘State Penitentiary, Joliet’.”

Somehow not too surprised, “What was Bill in for?”

“I’m not sure, but whatever it was, I guess he got caught.”

“Yup, it’s the old eleventh commandment.”

“ ‘Eleventh commandment’, huh. What’s the eleventh commandment?”

“He didn’t want me to be alone on my birthday, so Ruby came over Friday evening and we had a few drinks and I told him, according to you, ‘thou shalt put the toilet seat down’, was the eleventh commandment, and he told me maybe putting the toilet seat down was the twelfth commandment because the eleventh commandment is, ‘thou shalt not get caught’, which apparently your uncle did... How long was he in for?”

“Seven years.”

“No shit!” He tried to imagine what seven years out of his life might feel like but, just days into his twenty-second year, seven years was a third of his life and the thought was incomprehensible.

“Oh, yeah! Then there was this time my Aunt Dolly... You remember Dolly; Melvin’s wife?”

“Yeah. Melvin's the bookie.”

“They were both married to other people before, you know.”

“No! They’d both been divorced?” Mitchell had never known anyone who’d been divorced and now, to add to the mishmash of  the characters in Marsha’s family, there was not one, but two, and they were married to each other.

“Yeah, they were... I don’t suppose you’ve noticed, but Aunt Dolly likes to drink a little, and at our wedding...”

“Yeah, I have noticed!”

An attractive, petite, tightly packed natural blonde lady, Aunt Dolly did drink more than a little at their wedding.

“Well,” Marsha continued, “Dolly’s kind of a, uh, to say the least, vain kind of a person and, because she’d had her front teeth knocked out by her first husband, she wears a partial, and Melvin had never...”

Thinking, There’s a ‘wife beater’, too?  “Her husband beat her up?”

“Dolly’s first husband, yes. Anyway, Melvin had never seen Dolly without her partial, and she got so drunk at our wedding that she had to go into the toilet to puke and while she was puking she flushed the toilet and...”

“Uh, oh!” Mitchell said.

“Yeah! Uh, oh, indeed! She puked her teeth out and flushed ‘em down the toilet.”