The Six Rules of Maybe (10 page)

Through the space between my fingers, I could see that Clive Weaver wore his old man slippers, too, and worse yet, his former mailman helmet, which all gave him the unfortunate look of an old nude guy in search of a mail safari. I felt a little panic. Should I do something? What should I do? The tiny dangly penis was understandably distracting. His slippers scuffed along the sidewalk until he reached the mailboxes. His wide white ass sagged in the direction of the street. He opened his box, empty, and he shut it again.

“Fools,” he said loudly.

I was too embarrassed to move. His exposed flesh had stunned me into inaction. Instead, I peeked from a distance and made sure he got back into his house. I hoped he was okay. I wondered if I should tell Mom or call his daughters, something. Then again, he hadn’t continued out to the freeway or anything. He’d just gone to get his mail and had forgotten his clothes. Maybe this happened after a person worked forty-five years for the postal service.

Mom must have left Quill Stationers early, because her car was in the driveway. Hayden’s truck was gone, though. I had no idea what combination of people I might find there, in my formerly predictable house. Inside, though, it was as quiet as it usually was when I got home. No sign of my mother or Zeus. I heard the scrape of a lawn chair against the cement patio, though, through the propped-open kitchen door. Juliet was outside, lying out in the sun in her bikini. She reached one arm down to a squirt bottle of water, sprayed herself down and up as if she were a dry houseplant.

“Hey!” I shouted. “I’m home!”

“Out here,” Juliet shouted back without sitting up.

I dropped my backpack, grabbed a Fresca from the fridge. The whole bottom shelf of our refrigerator had been packed with diet sodas since Dean had come along to blow my mother’s self-confidence to smithereens. I made my feet happy and took off my sandals, headed out to the back. I noticed that Juliet had a Fresca too popped open beside her.

“Oh God, don’t look. I’m so fat,” she said. She looked fine to me: she had only the small mound of stomach us regular people always had. She made no move to cover herself up. That was another difference between us. Juliet was never shy about her body. I loved my body and all that, I just loved it more covered up.

“Clive Weaver was just outside naked,” I said.

“Who?”

“Clive
Weaver
? Come on, it’s not like you haven’t lived across the street from him practically your whole life.”

“Maybe he was hot,” she said, and squirted her calves with the bottle.

“Where’s Mom?” I asked. I wanted to ask,
Where’s Hayden?
but I didn’t.

“Next door. Wacky Mrs. Martinelli couldn’t sign on to the Internet and she came over all frantic.”

I sat on the lawn near Juliet. Picked up a tennis ball that must have been Zeus’s and threw it against our fence where it bounced and landed in Mom’s oregano bush. One of the neighbors behind us was getting their house worked on. I heard the
chink-chink-chink
of a ladder rising, the bass hump of music, lyrics drifting.
Some people call me the gangster of love, yeah. Some people walking round calling me Mau-rice… .
“I like Mrs. Martinelli. I like her a lot, actually.”

Juliet turned her head on the lawn chair and looked at me, annoyed. It was the same look she’d been giving me throughout our whole childhood, the kind I’d gotten in the backseat of the car when she felt I had taken too much space for myself or when my elbow accidentally touched hers. “What, are you going to fight me about whether Mrs. Martinelli is a kook now too? What is your problem? You’ve argued with every word I’ve said since I got home. You never even said congratulations. Not really.”

I waited. I guess it was true. “Congratulations, Juliet,” I said. I let my sarcasm show. I wondered how often people meant it when they said that word;
congratulations
was probably one of the biggest mixed-feelings word in the English language.

She rolled her eyes in exasperation. It was weird to look at her
body sprawled out like that. She didn’t seem to realize that she was different now, at least to me. I looked at that small mound. I remembered the pictures from the book; the tiny curled baby sea creature who now waited and grew inside of her while she swigged her Fresca, then set it on the glossy pages of the magazine she was reading. But it wasn’t just the tiny creature that made her different. Decisions could make you different too. A person could decide something that made them seem totally unknown and unknowable, even if you’d been with them nearly every day of your life.

“You shouldn’t drink that diet stuff. It’s bad for the baby,” I said.

“Thank you, doctor,” she said.

We sat there for a while. You could feel the fight there sitting between us. I hated conflict, but conflict with my sister was allowed. Conflict was part of our personal, forever playground. She would fight with me in a moment, but I never forgot that she’d fight for me too. “You know, I just don’t get the whole pregnancy thing,” I said. I picked at the polish on my toenails. I hoped Jitter couldn’t hear this. It was nothing personal. This was something between me and Juliet.

“What’s there to get? We had sex; there was an accident; we’re having a baby.”

“Jesus, Juliet.”

“Oh come, on, Scarlet. Don’t be such a prude.”

“I’m not being a prude. You’re just so flip about it.
Accident
.”

“Those things happen.”

“Not when you’re being
careful
.”

“I thought I
was
. Believe me, Hayden in bed can make you forget just about anything. It’s one of his finest qualities.”

“
Jesus!
” I wished I’d never said a word. God. “Never
mind
.”

“You brought it up.”

“You were on the
pill
,” I said.

“What are you implying? Are you accusing me of something? For God’s sake.”

“There are other
options
here.”

“Neither one of us wanted that, all right? Satisfied? It’s not like I trapped the guy, if that’s what you’re saying.”

“I’m
saying
it’s a little hard to understand. I’m
saying
you hugely disappointed Mom.”

“Oh, you’re kidding, right? What, I’m going to live my whole life for Mom?” She blew air out her nose, a huff that said what an idiot I was. She sounded like she was in middle school. “I’ve got to make my own decisions. Am I not allowed to
grow up
?”

Grow up.
The words sounded childish. You don’t fight for your right to grow up if you already have. “You’ve wrecked everything you said you wanted.” I said.

I remembered when she got the job at the Grosvenor Hotel, how we’d popped open a bottle of cider, clinked our glasses; how Mom had grasped Juliet’s hands and told her the world was hers, how she needed to follow her dreams, even if we all knew how much Mom wanted her to go to college. I remembered, too, how Juliet had packed up and left her room nearly empty, tiny holes in the walls where her posters had hung. We’d tacked up all of the postcards she’d sent us to cover those holes—postcards of the Grosvenor Hotel at night which were in every desk drawer in every room there, next to the free pens and stationery that no one used.

“I didn’t wreck; I reordered,” she said.

I stopped picking my polish and looked at her then.
Reordered
—the word Derek had just used not twenty minutes before, half hour tops, about why people blew things up. I listened to signs like that—a song heard twice when you turned the radio station, a line in a book
read at just the right moment. Little clues given by the universe. The word was suddenly important. It seemed like maybe it was a sign that I should do some reordering of my own. They’d argued about Buddy Wilkes the night before. Buddy Wilkes was her unfinished business. Business I could finish up right then and there.

“I saw Buddy Wilkes at school today,” I said.

Juliet sat up then. “You saw Buddy? What was he doing at school?”

“Picking up Alicia Worthen. They looked pretty serious. Really serious.”

“Alicia
Worthen
? She hasn’t even
graduated.
”

“You’re so lucky you didn’t stay with him. He just sat in his car and shouted at her.” I was making up some of it as I went along. I guess reordering wasn’t always a precisely planned thing. “Hayden would never act like that.”

“What’d he say?”

“He didn’t exactly yell
at
her, more
for
her. Just, ‘Alicia, get over here.’ Something like that. Like she was his
dog
or something. No, Hayden wouldn’t even treat Zeus like that. You wouldn’t believe it. He’s such an ass.”

“Alicia
Worthen
. God.” Juliet didn’t look well. I felt the alarming sense of things all at once going wrong—that slipping feeling, the movement in an unintended direction. The way the ground starts to roll under the flat surface of your shoes just before you fall. Maybe the reordering had been a bad idea. Maybe I had opened a door when I’d tried to shut one. Maybe the truthful part of me knew I wanted to hurt her and had.

The smugness I had seen Juliet wear every day since she had arrived seemed to melt, as if she had gone from having everything to having nothing.

“I shouldn’t have drunk that Fresca,” she said. She got up and went inside and in a few moments I heard her retching, the toilet flush, the faucet running.

I sat there on the grass, ran my hands over the blades. I felt a little sick myself. I smelled a whiff of Varathane or some other soupy, gleaming chemical coming from over the back fence. I heard a small burst of man-talk, a shout.
Whaddya say?
More faraway man-talk. Music.
I’m a joker, I’m a smoker, I’m a midnight toker… .

And then another sound, closer. Right there, from our own bathroom.

Juliet, crying.

Chapter Nine

T
his is what I call reciprocity,” Mom said, holding a pie dish on one palm.

“Lemon meringue?”

Mom nodded. It was Mrs. Martinelli’s specialty. “I perform the computer miracle called turn the machine off and back on and look what I get. Want some?”

“No thanks.” I gestured to the white bread I’d taken out of the cupboard for a snack, the jar of peanut butter.

“Tell me why it’s nice to have superior computer knowledge over someone, anyone.” Mom loved Mrs. Martinelli too. Sometimes Mrs. Martinelli would have lemonade with Mom at our umbrella table outside or coffee with her while sitting on the living room couch. They would pat each other’s hands and tell stories. Mom always said that she respected the sequined sweatshirts. Sequins required a certain confidence, especially when worn while gardening.

“I guess you got her connected again.”

“Maybe I shouldn’t have. Did you know they’re writing back and forth with some scammer? She said you knew all about it.” Mom didn’t wait for an answer. “Where’s Juliet?” she asked.

“She’s not feeling well.” I stuck my tongue out, mimed a throw-up face.

“Oh,” Mom said. “Poor thing. That’s too bad.”

“Why aren’t you at work?” I asked.

“I thought maybe I’d take the day off. Make sure Juliet was settled in.”

The words fell before I could catch them. “You didn’t even stay home with me when I had the flu and a hundred degree fever.”

“Scarlet,” she said as if it were the end of what she had to say even though it was the start. “I asked you over and over if you wanted me to stay. You said you were fine. You insisted. I took you at your word.”

I was going to tell her about Clive Weaver naked in the street, but I didn’t feel like it anymore. Some worm of jealousy and resentment was working around in my heart. I put my knife into the new jar of peanut butter. No matter what seemed to be going wrong in my life, there was something satisfying about that act. It was a mini-sense of triumph, a culinary groundbreaking ceremony, with me holding the special shovel.

Mom left the kitchen. I could see her through the door, standing in front of the stereo. She pulled her hair back in a ponytail and then let it go as she pretended to contemplate what to put on. She looked young like that. It was always strange when you saw your parent as a person, not a mother or father. I guessed that happened more when you had a single parent. They couldn’t hide in that thing called marriage. Mom stared down at Neil Diamond’s face
on the cover of
Neil Diamond’s Greatest Hits
, the one where his eyes are brooding but kind, and then on came the deep thrum of the guitar, and his voice.
Melinda was mine, ’til the time that I found her … holding Jim. Loving him …

“Mom, God,” I called from the other room.

“What?”

“I’m so sick of that I could scream.”

She put her hands on her hips. “I’m not exactly forcing you to stand there and listen, am I?”

“Play ‘Sweet Caroline.’” Juliet had reappeared. She looked pale, even after her day in the sun. She’d tied a sarong around her hips, sleeked her hair back in a long blond braid. “Remember how we all used to sing that loudly in the car?
Sweet Car-o-line, bum, bum, bum …
” She sang with that voice that could make you think about beautiful things—water droplets and tulips pushing up through frost. “Summer time,” Juliet said. “Scarlet with her teeth perpetually blue from Otter Pops.”

“I loved that,” Mom said. “Everywhere we went, we played this. You, me, Scarlet, and Scarlet’s
monkey
.”

“Jibbs,” Juliet said.

“God, he was so dirty, and you’d never let him out of your clutches, Scar,” Mom said. “I had to sew his head back on twice.”

“Remember when she used to get the words mixed up to ‘Jimmy Cracked Corn’?”

“‘Jimmy crapped corn, and I don’t care,’” they sang. How could I forget? I’d only heard the story a million times.

Juliet and Mom laughed, but I didn’t feel like playing. I took a bite of my sandwich. Something was irritating me. And irritating me even more when Mom put her hands on the sides of Juliet’s cheeks and looked into her eyes. “You okay, baby?”