I looked down then, giving in to that particular feeling of guilt that only parents can produce in their children. "Look, it's my choice, okay?"
"Yes, it is. It's a bad one, but it's yours. I'll remind you of that in a few years."
I rolled my eyes, standing up. "You know, I really don't understand why you're being such a jerk about this. It's not like you've ever even been interested in my life before, and now all of a sudden you're a concerned father?"
"Well, you used to be a smart girl who never made bad decisions. I couldn't figure out how you could possibly be the offspring of me and your mother, but the genes are finally showing through."
"I already told you, I'm not my mom," I stated, not at all in the mood for more lectures on what a dumbass I was turning out to be.
"You tell me that, yes, but your actions say otherwise, Nicole." He took a sip of his beer. "Now, I could sit here and explain to you all of the reasons you should just dump Derek right now and get out while you're ahead, but you won't listen to me anyway. You don't listen to me any more than your mother ever did—in that way you are exactly like her. Stubborn Harmon girls," he said, shaking his head. "You're all convinced you're right, then you act all surprised when some bastard smashes your heart open for the umpteenth time."
I frowned a little as I studied him a little closer. "Are you drunk?"
He smiled, tilting his head to the side a little. "Guilty."
"You just opened it."
"Katrina made dinner at home and there was lots of beer in her fridge."
"Did you drive?" I asked, my eyes widening.
"I'm an excellent drunk driver, and we were talking about your stupidity, not mine. Now, back to Mike's demon spawn."
"Ugh, Dad, just go to bed," I said, rolling my eyes in disgust and turning to go down the hall.
"No, come back here." He stood, pausing unsteadily and walked down the hall after me. "I want to talk to you."
"No, I don't want to talk about it," I retorted stubbornly.
"Of course you don't," he said easily, "because in your heart you know you're fucking your life up, just like Jamie did."
It always aggravated me when he talked like he understood my mother, because I had read her journals, and I knew her feelings for Alex. "You say that like you know what her thoughts were."
"Oh, I knew Jamie's thoughts more than most, Nicole Harmon,"' he said arrogantly.
"How's that? All the long conversations you shared?" I asked a sarcastically.
He laughed a little. "If you only knew. I knew more about your mother than anyone else did, she just…didn't like me very much," he said. "I suppose I probably didn't help, but…that's not the point. She still told me things—things she didn't tell anyone else. Mike may have been the one she loved, but I…" He paused, his gaze moving to the ground as he tried to focus on what he meant. "I was her friend. I was the one that she told…" He trailed off, a distant look on his face that I took for confusion.
Assuming that Alex was just being a maudlin drunk, I didn't take anything he said to heart. "Yeah, I know you were," I said, mostly just to humor him.
"Things…she never told anyone else," he repeated, leaning against our trailer wall. "Why did she have to tell me?"
Normally I wouldn't even pay attention to Alex when he was drunkenly blabbing on, but there was something in the way he slouched against the wall, his gaze distant, almost haunted.
I hesitantly questioned, "Things like what?"
He didn't answer, just stared at the ugly brown carpet on the ground. Finally, he shook his head slowly and said, "Nothing."
With that, he pushed himself away from the wall and said, "I have to work tomorrow, I need to go to sleep."
"Dad," I said, stopping him with the title I seldom used on him.
He stopped for a moment, but just long enough to smile at me in a way that I knew if there had been a window of opportunity to find some deep dark
secret he might harbor in that seemingly shallow head of his, the window had closed. With a light tousle to my curls, he swayed slightly and then made his way to his room, closing the door behind him with a murmured, "'Night, kid."
I stared at his door for just a moment longer, sighing and dismissing the whole drunken ordeal as I went back to my homework.