Deauville Drive, Huntington Beach, California

“I killed him, didn’t I?”

Decades later, I could still hear my mother’s stricken, choked words, her hands shaking. The scent of our freshly baked apple and peach pies floated through our sunny home, with a slight hint of the pink roses in a Ball jar on our kitchen table.

It was the Sunday after Thanksgiving, November 1979, and a fine blue afternoon. The hummingbirds were whizzing around, the birds were chirping, and there was no warning of what would happen next.

Panting with fear from what I’d seen, the thunk I’d heard, and my injured right arm, I bent over the man sprawled on our kitchen floor. Blood was pooling beneath his head like cherry Kool-Aid, mixing with pieces of the shattered red pie pan. His stomach bulged like a balloon.

“I don’t think he’s breathing, Mom,” I said, my voice wobbling, my throat raw from all the screaming I’d done. “But he looks pregnant.”

“Oh no, oh no, oh no,” she whispered, then swayed, her light-yellow daisy dress swirling around her knees. I grabbed her around the waist as her blue eyes shut, and she started to fall back.

“Mom!” I shouted, scared to death that I’d drop her as her knees gave out. “Mommy!”

Within seconds, Tommy flew into the kitchen, a tall, muscled tank of a man, followed by his sons Tony and Nick and my sister Joyce.

Tommy took charge immediately, lifting my fainting mother in his tattooed arms. “I got you, Annie.”

Nick reached for me and held me tight against his bare chest—he never wore a shirt—as Tommy gently carried my mother, her eyes fluttering, to the couch.

“Annie, don’t worry,” he said in a loud voice, probably to keep her from passing out completely. “I’m right here, and I will take care of this, I promise. Stay with me, honey, open your eyes.”

My heart was racing, my knees woozy. What happened had been one of the scariest things—probably the scariest thing—I’d ever experienced.

But Handsome Nick, with his arms tight around me, helped steady me on my feet, his warm, brown-gold eyes worried and inches from mine. I caught my breath, which might have had nothing to do with my mother and everything to do with Nick.

Tony and Joyce immediately crowded around us, Joyce linking an arm around my waist and Tony grabbing my hand and arm with both of his.

Tony said, so concerned, his face inches from mine, “Are you okay, Jesse? What happened?”

“Yes, I’m fine.” It was a lie—I wasn’t fine. I couldn’t believe what my mother and I had just gone through or how fast it had happened, how frightening. My hands started to shake.

Tony eyed the bleeding man on the floor as he patted my hand. “Uh-oh. This looks like a scene out of a horror movie.”

Nick nodded. “Yeah, he doesn’t look so good. Are you hurt, Jesse?”

Nick still had his arms around me, so I was, at once, terrified and enjoying how Nick smelled like sunshine, honeysuckle, and mint.

I said, “No,” but my arm ached where it had taken a blow.

Joyce said, her voice completely calm as she brushed my hair out of my face, “I never liked him anyhow. What a dick.”

A dick! Wow. Joyce had used a bad word. But it was fitting for the moment! She always knew what to say. Plus, she was so composed. Why couldn’t I be calm and smart like Joyce?

“You girls,” Tommy said to me and Joyce as he darted back from the couch where he’d deposited my near-fainting mother. “Go and help your mother.”

He stopped to bend down to examine me, face-to-face, and said another bad word, followed by, “Are you all right, Jesse?”

I lied again, and Tommy nodded and bent to check on the deathly and unconscious state of the pregnant man and said two very bad words.

Three days later, my mother was arrested. She faced a trial and possible jail time for swinging her favorite red ceramic pie pan at the pregnant man who’d attacked us. She was also told, by the pregnant man’s reptilian attorney, that she would likely lose custody of the five of us, permanently, because of her “unpredictable and unnecessary violence.”

How did that come about? Because the pregnant man lied about what happened.

It was 1979. A few powerful, rich men, for various sordid reasons, believed him. Or they pretended to believe him. Money talked.

I would never forget what led up to those terrifying moments or what happened later.

Never.