On the Road Again, by Jerry V.

My sister Tina wanted to be taken to see her favorite hijacking brother
who was doing his "killing time" in the Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary, with
such luminaries as the union boss who would one day disappear in New Jersey
and a future godfather of the five families in New York City, but since no
one wanted to take her - afraid she was going to have one of her epileptic
attacks due to her car accident of fifteen years before when running a stop
sign in Miami on her way to see her childhood lover who had become a
middleweight champion five years after they split - the burden of driving
her fell on me: the baby of the family, my wife and our two small children
whom I instructed to watch and see if their aunt's eye began to twitch to
shout out that fact immediately so I could pull over ready to stick
something in her mouth to prevent a tongue eating.
I didn't dare take Tina and my mother in the same car what with a nasty
rumor being whispered that our father had taken her as his mistress - a
thing my brothers and sister said Tina desired ever since she was nine years
old six or seven years before I was born seeing him planted inside a naked
woman whom he had taken home from the bar because our mother was carrying
Tom; hemorrhaging him out of her body at the sight of the two naked flailing
bodies entwined on the couch.
It would take me nearly a year after our mother died to confront him
with this unbelievable possibility ... "Pa, Tina is telling every-"
"Sure, the whore even told your mother's brother who everyone knows is
the king of the volunteer cuckolds! Did anyone see me on top of her?"
I wished he hadn't put it just that way. More to my liking would have
been seeing great shock on his face that such a thing could even be
suggested.
"But Pa, she told Uncle Deo you went over the week Mama died and-"
"She was always a liar!"
"But Pa, even her kids-"
"And I told her and all of them - out! Out! Out. I was sick and tired
of Danny's many showers a day with his wife Dixie to get rid of the dirt he
said was inside him - ever since that Troy of Troys put them into that
orphanage and that youngest one Michael in his twenties and still had to
sleep with a light on. My freezer was going empty Johnny and they were
putting nothing back in! Out, I said and that's why that evil-"
"You could have told them they couldn't move in," I said recalling it
was Tina who had asked him if she and her kids could move into the one
family home and I also wanted to remind him it was his and my mother's no
when I asked if the children could have moved in with us rather than to go
to an orphanage that allowed for their nearly two year imprisonment.
"She was a daughter," my father said and with that I dropped it all
fearing my accusation - if it were untrue - would have made his face crumble
as my words like a chisel did its painful probing ....
We arrived in time to sign up for lunch which enabled Leny One N the
opportunity to devour all the sandwiches our mother made him while we tried
to eat the prison food in colors I had seldom seen before.
"Gimmie you bitch!" Tina said
"Did you say Happy Easter?" Leny asked as a large portion of eggplant
rolled about inside his mouth.
"No, she's saying she wants one of the sandwiches me and Papa smuggled
in," I said.
"She's got her lunch!"
"Ah wanch youbs!"
"She's going to get us caught," Tom. our brother the lithium popping
psychoanalyst, whispered loudly.
"Please Tina - I don't want to get arrested!" Rhoda, Tom's fourth wife,
shouted; making other begin to stare at us.
I noticed our mother strangling her napkin as our father was trying to
hit himself in the head with his closed fists but our five year old son was
holding both his arms down mightily.
"Ersatz?" Tina said holding her nose with fingers from her partially
paralyzed right hand as we were also having a hard time identifying the food
staring up at us.
Needless to say, all this set the wrong tone making it become a very
short visit when Leny did his get rid of us lie by saying he had an early
appointment with his social worker, a guy named Sigmund Freud, and the end
of the visit accelerated even more when our father began hitting himself in
the head as he told flinching people how we had traveled three hundred miles
just for a lunch; a lunch we couldn't even identify!
The trip home was made extra long as Tina attempted directions to get us
out of Amish country and finally one friendly guy with a long beard told us
how to get onto Route Eighty which did head us back toward home - eight
hours away. END