San Diego is a recurring anchor in the family history of Cheri Domingo and Debbi Domingo, rather than a single, continuously inhabited home. It is where Cheri married Roger Domingo, where Roger returned after their separation, and one pole of the divided household between which Debbi moved repeatedly. After Cheri’s death, Debbi went back to San Diego, while her connection to her mother’s relatives gradually faded.

Marriage and Family Background

Cheri and Roger married in San Diego on September 19, 1964, shortly after Cheri turned eighteen. Their daughter, Debbi, was born the following August, and their son, David, arrived about a year later. Roger left the Coast Guard and became first a Methodist minister and later a middle-school teacher. In 1975, the family moved to Santa Barbara, shifting the children’s home life away from the city where their parents had married.

Debbi later remembered her first twelve years in warm terms: home-baked cookies, picnic lunches at Nojoqui Falls Park, and young parents who joined their children in play. That recollection establishes the family’s earlier closeness against the instability that followed. San Diego would become important again not as the setting of that childhood, but as the place Roger returned to after the marriage fractured.

A Household Between Two Cities

Cheri and Roger separated in December 1976. Roger moved back to San Diego, while Debbi and David divided their time between him there and Cheri in Santa Barbara. The two-city arrangement gave Debbi an opportunity to play her parents against one another: when one parent enforced a limit, she could threaten to leave for the other household. She moved back and forth for several years, changed schools at least half a dozen times, sometimes in the middle of a school year, and by July 1981 her formerly good grades had declined.

The arrangement also made San Diego part of Debbi’s adolescent social life. She became attached to an older boyfriend there, whom both Cheri and Roger considered a bad influence despite their frequent disagreements on other matters. When Cheri and the children moved into a house in Goleta in early June, Debbi missed the boyfriend and accumulated large telephone bills calling him. After a major argument with Cheri, she packed what she could, took her bicycle, and left; the account does not specify where she went immediately afterward.

Return After Cheri’s Death

When fifteen-year-old Debbi learned that her mother had died, she called her grandmother to report it. She moved to San Diego almost immediately afterward. The move placed her with a surviving parent, but it coincided with the gradual recession of her mother’s side of the family from her life. A remark she overheard from her grandmother, expressing relief that another relative had not been the victim, stayed with her.

In later years Debbi tried to renew contact with her grandmother and aunt, but neither responded. San Diego therefore marks a consequential change in her family geography: after years of movement between two parental homes, it became the destination of her immediate relocation after Cheri’s death, while ties to Cheri’s relatives weakened.

Narrative Significance

Across these episodes, San Diego is associated with marriage, separation, adolescent mobility, and bereavement. Its significance comes from its changing place in the family’s map: first the site of Cheri and Roger’s marriage, then Roger’s home after the separation, and later Debbi’s destination after the loss of her mother. The repeated movement between San Diego and Santa Barbara gives physical form to the household’s division; the return after Cheri’s death, in turn, does not restore the earlier family closeness. It is a recurring point of refuge and connection, but also the setting from which the story records a lasting estrangement.