"When was this?" I asked.
He shrugged. "I don’t know, I was little."
"Well..." That didn't help.
"Wait," he said. "No, I do remember, it was... around his birthday the year I started first grade. We still had cake left, because I remember she threw the cake at him."
"That's February," I remarked absently, my brain trying to put the pieces together. When the hell had this happened, and how did I not know about it?
But then I remembered that he said Mike claimed that it wasn't my mom that he cheated on her with.
"Well, did he ever say who it was?"
Derek shook his head. "Not that I know of. I don't remember hearing any other name, I just remember that fight. It was their worst."
"And it was near the end," I said, my interest stirred.
"What?" he asked, glancing over at me.
I looked up. "Oh, well, if it was near the end of February then... the accident happened in April, so that was just a couple months before the end. I turned seven in May, so..."
"I don't know," he said, sighing a little. "I don't want to talk about this anymore. I'm just tired of this, especially since I can't seem to stop liking you, even when I think I should."
I was only half paying attention at that point, my mind making its way back to the past, my only desire at that moment to go home and search through my mother's journals.
As soon as Derek dropped me off, I ran to my room.
I knew I had read through the last journal of my mother's, the one she never finished, trying to find some sort of reason, something that might have triggered her. As many times as I had searched, I never found anything. Everything seemed completely ordinary. It seemed like she had just snapped for no apparent reason.
I
dug the journals out again and went back to that February, carefully reading each entry again. I didn't know if I expected to find a page I had somehow missed before or what, but I didn't. The entries were still the same. It seemed to be just another ordinary month. No matter how thoroughly I read each entry, she just journaled about work, about me, about a conversation she had with Alex.
Mike’s birthday was the 15th, so I started concentrating on the 12th. But there was still no entry that read, "Oh, and I slept with Mike." On the 12th she had been pretty pleased with a particularly generous tip she got at work. On the 13th she had a bad dream (that she didn't describe) and then she went on to have a lousy day at work, then she didn't get home in time to even put me to bed. On the 14th was when she was talking about Alex, a conversation they had on the phone that day. Mike’s birthday was the 15th, and she just wrote that morning that she was already in a pretty lousy mood, that she didn't feel like going to work, that she just wanted to sleep in. "Today is always a little strange for me, which I find incredibly annoying." But that was the only comment that might have even been about Mike, as far as I could see.
She had to work that night until close, so she didn't write anymore until the 16th. On the 16th she was contemplative. She did mention him, because she wrote how she hated that February 15th was a bad day for her every single year. She wrote:
You would think after all these years it wouldn't matter anymore. You would think he wouldn't be able to get to me anymore. But he still can. Even knowing it's his birthday... thinking back to the year I got to see him for his birthday, because he had worked that day. I remember I teased him, and I told him I was going to give him a kiss for his birthday, then I gave him a Hershey's kiss. Of course I really did kiss him after that...
It felt so good to kiss him.
But why am I doing this to myself?
Never mind, I refuse to think about this anymore right now.
I have to go to work anyway, because Debbie called off again...
I kept reading carefully through each entry, although there were days that she didn't journal that month, but she never mentioned him again, not once for the rest of the month.
Maybe it really hadn't been her. It was somewhat disappointing to think about, but maybe Mike had just cheated on Sarah with someone else.
That thought made me a little angry. As much as my mother loved him, why would he choose to cheat with someone else? Did he really just not care about her? Had she been wrong about him? If it was someone else, the entire memory of their relationship was a lie. I almost felt like not only was he cheating on Sarah, but my mother's devotion.
It was a silly thought, but I still didn't like the idea that he would do that, even if I did think Mike was dirt bag.
On a whim, I decided I would read the journal she kept in April. I opened up the unfinished journal, although I had always hated reading that one. Oddly, it was the barest of them all. There were several blank spaces in that journal, days where she would just not write anything at all. You would have thought that the journal she was keeping when she finally snapped would be the most interesting, or at least the most depressing.
It wasn't. It was boring, to be perfectly honest.