Several weeks before my tenth birthday, I decided to broach the subject. It was a school day, and I was already dressed in shorts and a blouse, my tennis shoes damp and sandy from having been left outside. Daddy was at the oak breakfast table, drinking coffee and reading Variety. Anna was scrambling eggs. News blared from the small television on the counter. Gingerly, I reached over and turned the volume down.

“So, um, Dad,” I said keeping my tone casual. “I have some questions about my mother.”

My father flinched as if I had poked him in the eye. “Where the hell did that come from?”

“Dad, c’mon. You never talk about her. I don’t even know how you met.”

Anna placed our eggs on the table and shot me a warning look, which I ignored.

“Dad?”

“Not a good topic.” He grumbled.

I pulled the paper away from my father’s face. “But every single kid in America knows how their parents met,” I persisted.

“Don’t bother me with this crapola, Jackie.”

“I think I have a right to know some things.”

My father wiped the corners of his mouth. “I’ll eat at work,” he said, then got up from the table, kissed my forehead, and left. There was silence for a minute, then Anna began clearing my father’s breakfast plates and silverware.

“Put socks on.” She pointed under the table, avoiding my eyes.

“I’m not a baby.”

“Jackie.”

“None of my friends wear socks. Besides, my shoes are wet.”

“It’s your father’s rules,” Anna declared as she scraped food from the plates into the garbage.

“They should never have gotten married, to begin with.”

That was the first thing everyone said. With my father stubbornly mute on the topic, I questioned all our friends and neighbors, memo pad and pencil in hand like Harriet the Spy. Tammy, the checkout lady from the Mayfair Market; Mr. Jackson, the gray-haired, black-skinned security guy at the Malibu Colony guard gate who remembered all the comings and goings of the last twenty years; Will, the attendant from the Texaco station. I got an ear load from Brian, the manager at the Colony Coffee Shop where my mother had once worked. I filled up one whole notepad on my mother’s history by conducting interviews at the Malibu sheriff’s station. The police were especially helpful and surprisingly forthcoming! But the more I learned the more questions I had. Her life was like a giant puzzle with tons of missing pieces.