"Then why are you being like this?" I asked him.
He sighed irritably. "I don't want to talk about it."
"You never do," I responded. "But unfortunately I'm not really feeling the brooding silences you've been practicing lately. I want to know what's wrong with you, and if I have to use a crowbar, I will pry it out of you."
"Look, Nikki, the only person you have to deal with is Alex, and he doesn't have a problem with my father or me. It isn't like that for me. As soon as someone in my family finds out that I actually associate with you, I'm automatically betraying my mother's memory, and I'm sick of catching shit about it."
I frowned at him. "That's stupid."
"Maybe it is, but it's what I deal with," he said in an agitated tone, turning his attention back to his books.
Since he had been weird since Thanksgiving, I assumed it was at that dinner that it had come up, but why would it still be bothering him?
I decided to be nice, and I got on my knees behind him and started to give him a back massage. "Well, do you want to talk about it?" I asked. "Maybe it would help to make you less grumpy."
"Doubt it," he said, but allowed me to keep rubbing his shoulders.
"Before we reject the idea, let's try," I suggested. "Tell me, when did this start?"
"The day your mother decided to crash into mine."
I tensed a little, but didn't let it bother me. "You know what I mean. You've been nice lately, you've taken me to bookstores, you've talked about my future, and you’ve acted like a real friend to me."
He scoffed a little. "Yeah."
Undeterred, I went on. "Then you went to Thanksgiving dinner. Is that where it started?"
He sighed as I started to massage his neck and admitted, "My grandmother didn't know I even knew you. I don't know that she even knew you existed."
"How did she find out?" I asked, continuing to knead the tense muscles in his back.
"My step-mom cluelessly told her," he said. "My grandmother... she adored my mother, at least that's what I've been told. My dad started seeing my mom when he was 14, and I guess my grandmother has loved her ever since. As far as she's concerned, my liking you is the most blatantly disrespectful thing I could ever do to my dead mother, and we got into a fight about it. She makes me feel like shit, and it pisses me off, because... honestly, I don't understand why I'm supposed to hate you. It just doesn't make sense anymore. I know I've always been under the impression that I was supposed to hate you, so I just did, but that was before I knew you. Now that I know you I just don't understand why the hell I should have to hate you because of something your mother did over a decade ago. Yes, I lost my mother, and that sucks, and of course I miss her, but you aren't the one who did it and I shouldn’t have to feel guilty for liking you. You’re your own person. Nobody gets that."
I stopped massaging him in the middle of his speech, although I didn't realize it. But I couldn't seem to help it. As soon as he told me that he got in a fight with his grandmother for sticking up for me...
Nobody ever stood up for me. Especially not Derek. It made me feel so good inside to think of Derek actually standing up to his grandmother, probably in front of his father, and defending me. I couldn't even describe the way that made me feel.
"Really?" I asked a little quietly.
He nodded, lying down on the bed. "I just don't feel like I'm wrong, I feel like they are. But I'm really sick of having to fight with people about it. I'm really sick of people being on my case and saying that I'm being disloyal to my mother because I decided to be with you. Maybe that is how she would see it, I don't even know..."
I thought about it for a moment, then I cuddled up next to him, draping an arm across his shoulders. "You know what, I don't think she would," I finally said. "I mean, there's no denying that our mothers hated each other, but that's because they loved the same man. Personally, I don't believe they would have wanted to condemn us to that kind of hatred. When I think about it, I never even consider that my mom would be angry at me for not hating you. I know she wouldn't."
It took him a moment, but then he said, "You must have known your mother better than I knew mine."
"Well, you had a mother and a father," I reasoned. "I didn't. My mom was pretty much all I had, and I was all she had. We were each other's world. Your mom... had Mike, so... If my mother would've had the man she loved, maybe I wouldn't have gotten so much attention."
He glanced over at me. "You know, I never remember feeling like they loved each other. I don't even know if they did."
That comment made my heart skip a beat, but I didn't know how to coax information out of him without making him clam up. So I just casually responded, "Really?"
Derek nodded. "They fought a lot, I think I told you that. He cheated on her once," he said.
My heart dropped when he said that. "What?" I exclaimed.
He nodded his head. "I remember hearing her screaming at him, hearing things breaking against the wall. She thought it was your mom, he said it wasn't. I don't know if she believed him, I just remember she kept screaming ‘that whore’ at him."
My mind raced, and I dug to the very depths of my memory, trying to figure out if there was some journal I was missing. Surely if Mike would have cheated on Sarah with her, she would have recorded that. And was he married? Would she have really done that? She might have, I realized. She loved him more than anything and would have done anything to be with him, probably including being an adulteress.