Merilee’s eyes darted around. She looked at the pharmacist in his white lab coat then at the two policemen. With her two prior arrests for shoplifting, she would go to jail for a minimum of two to five. She looked at Hank, who looked back at her, an impatient expression on his normally pleasant face.

Merilee would never have looked at Sidney were it not for the sound of the toaster popping his onion bagel, but fortunately, she did. And in his sympathetic expression, she saw her ticket out. Didn’t she know how to make a guy feel needed? To make him feel big and hard and strong and tall? Merilee’s filled her baby blue, Olympic-size swimming pool eyes with helpless tears of desperation, and in response, Sidney drew in his breath and flung himself off the high dive.

“Excuse me, uh…” Sidney stammered. “I am a lawyer and this girl, uh, young woman is my client.”

“What?” said Roy and Hervé.

“Yes, and I’m reporting you for police brutality.”

“Huh?” Hank said, looking down at Sidney.

The customers gasped and glared at the cops. Police brutality was a term associated with events that happened in far-off places like Watts or New York, certainly not in Malibu, in the morning, on a lovely beach day.

Without warning, Steve the pharmacist lunged for the apron still clutched tightly in Merilee’s hands.

“Gimme that, you bitch,” he snarled.

Merilee screamed.

The cops sprang into action. With the heat off their own backs, they pulled the pharmacist off my mother (who managed to hang onto her apron and the stolen makeup), cuffed him, and hauled him off to the station.

Amid her customer’s cheers, Merilee threw her barely bruised arms around Sidney’s neck, and in front of Hank and all her regulars, kissed Sidney in a way that suggested more than gratitude for her freedom.

A week later, the pharmacist and his lover packed up their Malibu apartment to start a new life in West Hollywood while at the same time Merilee Miller took her meager belongings from her mother’s in Van Nuys to move into Malibu Colony with Sidney. And only three months later, still pumped up from his conquest, my father proposed to his dream girl after the shocking news of her pregnancy.

INT. MALIBU COLONY HOME

DAY

JUNE 1968

“The honeymoon was over before it started.” That’s what everyone said.

In the early months of her pregnancy, my previously fun-loving mother suffered from morning sickness that lasted day and night. When she wasn’t throwing up, she was desperately trying to make herself over to fit into my father’s life. Daddy didn’t have friends, he had tennis partners and business associates, and his business associates had wives.