The Six Rules of Maybe (11 page)

Juliet groaned.

“I know.”

The doorbell rang then. “If it’s Mrs. Martinelli again, I’ve reached my end of computer knowledge,” Mom said.

Juliet went to the door, opened it. “Silly, you don’t have to ring the doorbell,” she said. I heard the happy
tick-tick-tick
of Zeus’s toenails arriving on the wood floor, and Hayden’s voice in the hall.

“We are now officially employed!” he said. He appeared in the kitchen. His sunburn from a few days before was turning brown. His hair was sweet-rumpled, and Zeus pushed past him and came toward the counter, his nose up in the air, sniffing for something that
might be/maybe/is it?
peanut butter.

“You got a job?” Mom asked.

“I’m calling myself a dock manager,” he said. “But I’m really just hired to fix stuff there at the marina, work on Will Quail’s boat. I was afraid to commit to anything more permanent since we haven’t decided”—he knew to be careful, paused to choose the right words—“things.”

For a moment, Juliet said nothing and Hayden said nothing which meant they were saying a lot. The moment passed. You could feel a decision being made, hers, an instant mental pro-and-con list. She looped her arms around his waist then, and you could also feel something melt, fast as butter in a hot pan. Hayden put his hand around her bare back and sniffed her hair. He was someone who fell easily into forgiveness.

“Old man Quail used to teach Driver’s Ed,” she said.

“He’s deaf as a stone,” Hayden said.

“He’s always been deaf as a stone,” Mom said. “Too many rock concerts during the Age of Aquarius.”

Juliet released Hayden, turned to place herself against him,
standing with her back against his chest. “He used to go, ‘Turn that radio off!’ when it wasn’t even on.” She grabbed Hayden’s arms, wrapped them tightly in front of her. She hadn’t been this affectionate with him since they’d gotten here. The whole aloof business was gone.
Thank Alicia Worthen for that
, I thought. It was the law of diminishing options.

I felt the wave rise—the wave of vague
pissed-off
—a pissed-off without a name. An edge of anger that might really have been disgust. All of this easy forgiveness wherever you turned. I shoved my feet into my sandals. I suddenly just wanted to get out of there, away from all of them.

“Tacos for dinner?” Mom said. “Can you eat that, you think?” She peered worriedly at Juliet.

Juliet nodded. “Oh yeah. Let us help.” She lifted up one of Hayden’s arms, pretended to bite it.

“I hold the record for cheese grating,” he said.

I choked back the bite of my sandwich. “I’m actually heading out,” I said. I heard the edge in my own voice, the letting-them-know but not-letting them-know anger. It pushed up against me inside, made my face flush.

“Oh?” Mom said.

“Dinner plans with friends.”

She didn’t even ask her usual twenty follow-up questions. Who would be there, what time I’d be back, if a parent would be present. She’d either given up on my doing anything different from babysitting or hanging out with Nicole and Jasmine, or she was too preoccupied to really care. “The car needs gas,” she said. “Take my card and get some.”

Anger and irritation were fighting for first place inside of me, and I made some attempt at a rare dramatic gesture. I swiped her keys off
the counter and stormed toward the doorway, realizing too late that
shit, shit, shit,
one foot was suddenly bare and landing on the linoleum floor. My shoe, that traitor, had abandoned me, and it now sat alone over by the counter. I had to do the one-shoe limp back to retrieve it. It would be so much better if humiliation was private.

I heard a little
hnn
sound from Juliet, a laugh trying not to be a laugh. Forget that shit. I got out of there. I left my half-eaten sandwich, left my backpack full of homework. Left cloudy motivations and strange workings of the heart. Left small humiliations and big disappointments.

Neil Diamond was still crooning.
Good times never seemed so good
… If I never heard that goddamned Neil Diamond again it would be too soon.

The tick of Mom’s gas gauge was as far into the red as it would go, so dangerously low that it was Dean-Neuhaus-would-never-do-this low. My psychology books would call this passive-aggressive behavior, subtly striking back at someone who seems more powerful, only my mother was getting it wrong, because she was the only one who was sure to be punished. I pulled into Abare’s, which we all still called Eugene’s, since that’s what the gas station had been for a hundred years before the old guy died. It was sold after he was gone and a mini-mart was put in, and the only thing that stayed the same was that they still hired guys from our high school to pump gas for elderly ladies like Cora Lee from the Theosophical Society and Mrs. Dubbs, who worked in the deli at Johnny’s Market. Buddy worked at Eugene’s, too, but I didn’t see either him or his car. I pulled into the lane marked
SELF-SERVE
, chugged gas into Mom’s tank as the wavy lines of fuel fumes made a psychedelic escape.

“Hey,” a voice called. I assumed not to me. Maybe someone was
shouting to the chunky motorcyclist in his chunky leather jacket.

“You.”

I looked up. It was Jason Dale, a guy who had graduated a few years ago, one of Buddy’s friends. He obviously didn’t know my name, but I knew things about him. He’d been a hard-core partier. He’d gone out with Renny Williams’s sister, Wendy, and some people said she’d gotten an abortion. Juliet thought he was an idiot. She thought all Buddy’s friends were idiots.

“Aren’t you Juliet Ellis’s sister?”

“Yeah,” I said. If I had business cards, that’s pretty much what they’d read.

“Is it true she’s back in town? Someone said they saw her.”

I played a mental chess match, with Hayden on my team. I calculated how long that news would take to reach Buddy. I hung up the gas pump. “Nope. Someone saw wrong.”

“Shopping downtown?” He still sounded hopeful.

“She’s in Mexico,” I said.

“Oh cool.” He rubbed his angled cheeks with his palms as if feeling for a nonexistent beard.

“Yeah.” I was ready to expand on my story. I had her singing for some cruise line, docked in Aruba and heading out to sea where she would be unreachable for months, but the details didn’t prove necessary. Jason Dale walked back to the mini-mart without a good-bye; his jeans droopy in the back like Clive Weaver’s bare skin. The motorcyclist gunned his engine and arced out of the lot.

I got back in Mom’s Honda Accord. I moved the seat and changed the radio station because I knew she didn’t like that. I turned the radio up loud enough to feel it thrum inside my body. I needed music that loud sometimes, loud enough to feel like a heartbeat.

I didn’t really know where I was going. Not to Nicole’s or Jasmine’s. If I had a father, I thought, this would be the time I would go to wherever he was. It was not the kind of thought I usually allowed myself. It was stupid. But this time I gave myself a pass for one visiting-my-perfect-father fantasy. I tried it on for about two seconds until it felt like I was wearing a silly and pointless hat in public. Awkward, embarrassing, never mind.

Instead I drove over to Point Perpetua Park. I had another fantasy on the way—me putting Jitter into a baby seat and driving far away where I could make sure he was never around unhappy parents. I would buy him soft clothes and read him books and teach him to aim high. It was still early evening, and the light was just dimming to twilight and turning thoughtful. I walked down the forested path and out to the beach. An older lady with poofy white hair walked with her small poofy, white-haired dog, and Bea Martinsen, who told fortunes at the Sunday market, sat at one of the benches eating a take-out hamburger from one of Pirate’s Plunder’s bags. When I reached the beach, I saw a couple who looked like they were having an argument and the guy who always played the bagpipes around town, who now sat on the sand and watched the waves. I picked my way over to the rock where Hayden and I had sat. A small collection of shells was up there—someone had been there since we had and had forgotten their treasures.

The water was choppy, and the waves were traveling at a rambunctious angle. A tanker inched by in the distance. The wide sea and rocks and beach should have set things right for me, that’s how it had always worked before, but I still felt some ugly feeling in my chest, something metallic and twisted, some kind of wreckage. I tried to untwist and understand. It didn’t feel good. It felt a little close to hate. Maybe I was hating Juliet, and it felt wrong to hate
Juliet. Maybe what I hated was that Juliet could do no wrong even when she did one of the biggest wrongs.

The arguing couple made up, took hands, and then kissed deeply by the shore, the water wetting their shoes. The old lady appeared with her dog and they walked a bit, and then she picked him up just before he headed toward a glittery pool of broken glass. Maybe I had also always felt sure of something I wasn’t so sure of now. That if I followed some rules of being nice and good, everything would work out okay. That at least this meant I was giving fate its best shot to follow through the way it should. Good people would get good things; wrong acts were punished. You’d get back what you gave, because that was only fair. Maybe being good to other people was often really only about hope—your hope that if you acted the right way, the pieces of the universe would fall into their true and just place. If you were being honest, that was a good part of why you did it, right? It was a way to protect yourself. Sort of a shield against wrongness, only maybe wrongness just didn’t care about rules or hope or other people’s good intentions.

I sat there for a long time, until everyone had left and there were only two guys smoking cigarettes on the beach. The shadows were getting long and night was falling, and so I finally left. I went down to the marina and picked up a hamburger and fries and a shake at Pirate’s Plunder, because I tended to catch other people’s food choices, same as a yawn. I ate it in Mom’s car with the windows rolled down so the lingering french fry smell didn’t give away what I’d actually done with my night.

The TV was on in the living room but the lights were off when I got home. I didn’t want to catch Juliet and Hayden making out, so I crept upstairs. There was a crack of light under my mom’s door. I made my way over the creaks in the hall, shut my door by turning
the handle oh-so-quietly.

There was a tap then.

“Scarlet?”

“Yeah.”

Mom poked her head in. “You okay?” One hand was on the doorjamb, the other at her side. Plain, ringless hands. She never wore rings. I had asked her why, once. She had said she liked her hands to belong to herself.

“Yeah.”

“You don’t seem okay. Can I come in?” I nodded. She sat on the edge of my bed. She looked up at my wall of photos—Mrs. Martinelli in her frog sweatshirt, the back of Nicole and her mom looking into their refrigerator, Buster standing around with Ginger, as if they were catching up on dog gossip, a little girl staring with wide eyes into Randall and Stein Booksellers as if it were a toy store.

“I like that one,” she said.

“This?”

A shot of Goth Girl’s
Mona Lisa
. The Saint Georges’ lawn took up the top half of the frame; the painting filled the bottom.

“Next to it.” It was the back of Mr. Martinelli’s neck. The straight line of his crew cut set against a blue sky. “You’ve got a really good eye, you know.”

“Thanks.”

She tucked her brown hair behind her ears, and then tucked it again, as if she were about to deliver some bad news. She opened her mouth to say something, shut it for a revision, tried over. “I know this is hard. This stranger, coming and moving into our house … His dog. All this with Juliet. This situation thrust on us. I know that even I don’t understand how this happened.”

I looked down at my comforter. Traced the threads with my
finger. Boy, was she getting it wrong.

“It’s new for me, too,” she went on. “We don’t even know anything about him. And then, a
baby
…” She sighed. “God. She’s so young. I think about how young I was… .”

I tried to imagine this, a younger version of my mom, pregnant with Juliet. Some stranger with white-blond hair who spoke and ate and made decisions and maybe loved Mom and maybe didn’t. Twice in one day was more than I’d thought about him in years.

“I don’t understand how she could do something so stupid,” I said.

Mom thought. “Well, sometimes … you think it’s going to decide something. Marriage. A baby.”

I didn’t know where she was going with that. Mom could be fond of misty and beside-the-point musings. The kind you got when you’d been listening to music and were therefore in some mood to be profound. I didn’t care about any of that.
Profound
was just a way to keep your distance from prickly life truths. I didn’t want soft, misty talk. I hated conflict,
hated it
, especially with Mom, but I chanced the truth. “You don’t seem that upset,” I said quietly.

“What?”

“Not really. You’re not that mad at her.”

Mom shook her head. She looked at me like she couldn’t quite understand where I was coming from. Her face changed, lost its softness. Her voice was irritated. “I’m just trying to do the best I can here.”

I kept tracing the threads with my fingertip. I could go farther, but it might mean a real argument, a guilty and unsettled night’s sleep, and the dreaded waking up with the knowledge that things were wrong between us. I kept quiet. We just sat there silently. I listened to Mr. Martinelli drag his rubber garbage cans down the
cement driveway to the curb.

“All right, Scarlet. If this is the way you want it … ,” Mom said. She waited, but I gave her nothing back. She got up and left me alone again.

I tried to get into bed and go to sleep, but sleep was stubborn and taunting, staying just out of reach. I wondered if I should make a list of things we needed for the baby. I listened to crickets and folded up my pillow and tried it that way and then unfolded it again. The sheet had gotten all scrunched at the bottom of the mattress and I was sorting out my confused bed when I heard a noise out on the street. Footsteps. A voice? I peeked out my window.