A parent fabricated a health scare to lure a child home

Evidence

I have a successful friend in the music business I met when I was twenty-one and he was only sixteen. It was 1966 and I had been away from home for over a year. Eddy was playing drums in a pop music duo at the Scheppes’ Pizza Parlor, where my mother waited tables back in Paterson, New Jersey. That year I had allowed my mom to lure me back from California by telling me her doctors suspected she had a heart condition. Since I was in between jobs and apartments, I spent my last dime to buy a plane ticket, and as soon as I got back to New Jersey, she announced the good news: her heart condition proved to be only a bad case of gas. But by then I was stuck in New Jersey, living at my parents’ home until I could earn enough money to move back to my adventures in Hollywood. — Dolores DeLuce, Blow Jobs, 134