The Six Rules of Maybe (15 page)

“Let’s stick dog poop down there,” Jacob said, and they both cracked up.

Mrs. Martinelli reappeared. She had her reading glasses hanging on her neck, and she held another sheet of paper out to me.

I read:

I hope this mail meets you in a perfect condition. If you do not remember me, you might have received an e-mail from me in the past regarding a multi-million-dollar Business Proposal which we never concluded. I am using this opportunity to inform you that we are awaiting your future reply, as the fate of my cocoa plantation depends on it. My sources say that your efforts, Sincerity, Courage, and Trustworthiness are widely known….

“Morin Jude!” Mrs. Martinelli exclaimed. “She is persisting, Scarlet. Mr. Martinelli and I appreciate persistence.” She popped her glasses on her nose and admired the note.

“Mrs. Martinelli.” I sighed.

“Oh, I know what you’re going to say. But you can’t tell me Morin Jude sent this letter to just anyone. She chose us.”

“Thousands of people,” I said. “Mass, mass mailing. Morin Jude
lives in Cleveland, or something, I promise you. Morin Jude’s real name is Buck Johnson. He shoplifts beef jerky at mini-marts in his spare time.”

“Mr. Martinelli won that citizenship award at Rotary,” she said. I shook my head—I didn’t understand. “Sincerity, courage, trustworthiness? We protested the Vietnam War, you know.” She took her glasses off and stared at me hard. Her eyes were the light violet color of the lavender bush in her yard. The skin of her neck drooped in folds.

“I know how tempting it is,” I said. I didn’t know at all, actually. “You’re going to have to trust me. You give any money to these people, and it’s
sayonara
.”

“We wouldn’t give
money
.”

“Okay.”

“We’re not idiots.”

“Good.”

She clutched my wrist. Her arm had a thin gold watch on it. She was surprisingly strong. “We’ve been around the block,” she said. I think the block may have been the only thing they’d been around.

Jeffrey’s Popsicle slid from his stick then. He wailed his protest. He held up the empty purple stick for Jacob to see.

“Feed it to the sewer,” Jacob said, and they both cackled.

*

I heard the vacuum on, but there were no back and forth sounds of actual vacuuming—only the steady roar of the machine standing still. That’s why she didn’t hear me come in, either. She didn’t hear me come up the stairs or pass by Juliet’s room. There were vacuum tracks in the hall, but they stopped where Mom stood, right over the threshold of Juliet’s doorway. Her face was soft and serious. Her mouth was open slightly as if she’d been taken by surprise. She held
the note,
The Five Rules of Maybe
, in one hand. She looked down at it and down at it, as that vacuum roared beside her. She looked down as if it were telling her things she’d needed to know for a very long time.

I understood her in a way I never had before as I watched her. I felt so close to her. I saw a narrow fiber of our connection, me and her, us—not her and Juliet. Was that even a real or likely thing? It seemed so. Maybe it was deep in our bones, submerged far in the rivers of our bloodstreams, but the two of us seemed joined then by something Juliet would never feel—the hunger for things too far away to touch, the need to believe in private and impossible longings.

Chapter Thirteen

T
here was no sign of Juliet or Hayden as it grew closer to dinnertime. Mom was in the kitchen, ripping lettuce into a bowl.

“I wish he’d stop staring,” Mom said. Zeus sat very straight next to her. So straight he was sure she’d notice his fine behavior and drop him a nibble of something. His triangle ears looked like they were trying very hard to be as upright as possible too. “It’s like he knows things about you.”

“Zeus!” I clapped my hands, but he just kept sitting like a little soldier and staring at Mom. He could really focus for someone who also had these wild ADD moments.

“Never mind,” Mom said. “I suppose I’m getting used to him. He’s not the worst company in the world. By the way, Dean’s coming for dinner.”

I noticed how close the words
worst company in the world
and
Dean
came to each other. The psychology books would have some
thing to say about that. Zeus tried a different tactic. He lay down, set his chin on his paws. It was the cutest thing in the world, and I’m sure he knew it. We looked at each other, and he blinked one eye. Sometimes, I swear he winked on purpose. “It’s like he’s a person but not a person,” I said.

“Dean?” Mom said. She kept ripping lettuce.

“
Zeus
.” I laughed. Maybe in her most secret, honest places she hated Dean as much as we did. You couldn’t help but see what he was really like, could you? I’d always thought telling the truth to other people was hard, but maybe that was a snap compared to telling the truth to yourself. Sometimes we just refused to know what we knew.

“Where’s Juliet?” I asked.

“Doctor’s appointment.”

“For sure?” I asked.

She stopped with the lettuce. Wiped her hands on a towel. “For sure.”

“Did Hayden go with her?” Juliet couldn’t see Buddy Wilkes if Hayden were there.

“Yes, Hayden was with her. Is there some reason you’re so concerned?” Mom opened the fridge, took out a cellophane bag of mushrooms. Then she looked at me, narrowed her eyes into a question. There were little wrinkles at their corners that I’d never seen before. Those wrinkles, and the few brand-new gray hairs at her temples—they made me want to be a better daughter from here on out.

“I’m worried about—” I stopped before I said it.
Buddy Wilkes
. I had no real proof, not yet. I played the scene in my mind. Mom would defend Juliet; I knew that. That’s how it had been forever. Perhaps when things were too close, you just couldn’t see them. Same as when you held a piece of paper right up to your nose.

“The
baby
? You can say the word, Scarlet. It’s okay. We might as well get used to it. They’re seeing Dr. Crosby. Marla. Juliet didn’t want to go to old Doc Young, and I don’t blame her, even if he’s delivered every baby on this island for the last forty years.” Old Doc Young had hair coming out of his ears in surprised tufts and a little ancient car as old as he was with fluff coming out of the seats. Some people look like their dogs; old Doc Young looked like his car.

“Juliet shouldn’t be eating so much sugar,” I said. “I saw her scarf half a box of chocolate doughnuts. It’s not good. It puts her at risk for gestational diabetes.”

“You’re worried about
Juliet
. Oh I know, honey, me too. The idea of her going through
labor
… Our Juliet? Come here.” She opened her arms to me. She hugged me with the mushrooms over my shoulder, and I hugged her back and took the sympathy she was offering even if it was misdirected. “Juliet’s going to be fine. She and Hayden probably stopped at the park or something. It’s good for them to spend some time together.”

The hug and those wrinkles made me feel especially open toward her and I chanced the truth again. “She doesn’t seem to love him enough,” I said into Mom’s shoulder.
He could leave
, I wanted to say; that’s what I most needed to tell her, what we most needed to talk to each other about, but right then Zeus started to bark madly. He took off, his toenails skittering and sliding across the floor. He knew the sound of Hayden’s truck—he could hear it blocks away. He stood by the front door, barking and wagging and waiting, his rump turning circles of joy.

“They’re here now,” Mom said. She didn’t hear me. She let me go and went to the door.

Juliet was already inside, and she tossed her purse on the couch. “God, that was too real.”

Hayden came up behind her. He was grinning widely. He scruffed Zeus under the chin, then grabbed a handful of Juliet’s peasant blouse and pulled her backward to him. I felt a sharp pinch of want, which I quickly shoved into the recycle bin of my mind. “We heard a heartbeat.”

Mom held her hands to her mouth. “Oh my God.” Her eyes were shiny as if she might cry.

“Remember when I was in that play,
The Bat
? Middle school?” Juliet said. Mom nodded. Mom had moved her hands from her mouth to her own heart. “They had this big piece of metal they used as a thunder machine. It sounded like that.”

“
Shoo, shoo, shoo
,” Hayden demonstrated. His eyes were bright.

“Beautiful,” Mom whispered. “Really. This is a beautiful thing.”

Juliet pushed away from Hayden a little. “Kind of creepy, if you think about it. A heart inside my own body.”

“Jeez, Juliet,” I said. I hoped and hoped again that Jitter with his real beating heart couldn’t hear anything in there. He needed to know he was one hundred percent loved and wanted.

“Beautiful creepy,” Hayden said. “Fantastic creepy. Maybe not even creepy at all creepy.”

“I’m hot,” Juliet said. She lifted her hair up from her neck. “I’m going to change.”

Juliet walked upstairs as we all stood below. It was perfect, really. Juliet above us, Juliet away, us gawking and wanting more. It seemed wrong that she was taking Jitter with her. He should have been there with us instead, with me and Hayden and Mom.

Hayden looked at us. His eyes pleaded.

“Pregnant women are very emotional,” Mom said.

*

“It’s the couples who are ordering wedding invitations and who
argue over everything that get me,” Mom said. Her cheeks were rosy with wine, and her voice was lively at dinner. We sat around the table, Zeus right by my chair, looking up at me. I really liked his furry chin. It was so small and serious.

“This one groom got outraged over an embossed rose. Outraged!” Mom went on. “A really ugly peach rose. He stormed out. ‘Just because your parents are paying for everything, I don’t get to exist.’”

“And they lived happily ever after,” Juliet said.

“He was not angry about the rose,” Dean Neuhaus said. He was under the impression that we would not be able to figure this out ourselves, not without his help. It was lucky we could function in the world without him.

“The in-laws’ll be at that guy’s house every night for Sunday dinner,” Hayden said.

“I know!” Mom said. “Right?” She looped pasta on her fork but the whole enterprise slipped off and she had to try again. Her bra strap was showing and she hadn’t noticed. She was enjoying herself.

“He better run for his life,” I said, though only part of me was paying attention. I kept thinking about tomorrow. Saturday. Saturday and Juliet and Buddy Wilkes’s note. I’d gotten rid of it, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything. He wouldn’t have heard back from her, and maybe he would try again, then. There had to be something I could do.

“In two years, your business will be closing its doors,” Dean Neuhaus said. “Even wedding invitations will be electronic.”

“I don’t believe it,” Mom said. “You can’t tell me that. There’s something special about real paper, real ink. A message written by hand? It has an importance,
permanence
.”

Dean scoffed. “Shredder? Recycling …” He was counting his points on his fingers.

“What if a message is not destroyed but is saved forever in a small cedar box?” Hayden said. He really was a romantic. Who was a romantic anymore? Even his hands were romantic hands. Long, strong fingers. The kind that might carve something out of wood for his beloved, that cedar box, something everlasting.

“A letter is a gift,” Mom said. “It’s tactile. Intimate.”

“An e-mail’s about as passionate as a Post-it note,” Hayden said.

“A handwritten letter—one heart to one heart,” Mom said. They were both nodding. Juliet looked amused.

“Or to two hundred fifty, depending on who’s on the guest list,” Dean Neuhaus broke a breadstick in half. God, it must have gotten tiring being him.

“A letter means something could happen,” I said.

Hayden looked at me. “
Yes
. Yes.”

Mom nodded. “A letter is about possibilities.” But then she blushed.
Possibilities
. The blush already in her cheeks now spread down her neck and into the collar of her shirt. A guilt blush from reading the contents of that note. Maybe we both should have been blushing.

“Two years, stationery stores … gone.” Dean Neuhaus made a slash in the air with his manicured hand.

“Nonsense,” Mom said. Dean Neuhaus raised his eyebrows. He was that kind of man—you were stepping out of place if you disagreed with him. “A letter is an art form,” Mom said. “Art forms tend to last. People build
museums
for art forms.”

“Your scrapbooks are an art form,” Juliet said. “God, I used to love watching you cut and glue and arrange. Show Hayden.”

“You did? You liked that? They’re silly maybe,” she said.

“Show him,” Juliet said. It was funny how sentimental she was about our past life suddenly. She had never seemed to care before.
Before, all she wanted to do was to leave us. Now she seemed capable of getting gushy about our old microwave.

“If you want,” Mom said, but she sounded pleased. She shoved her chair back and went upstairs. I could hear the weight of her footsteps above us, the creak in the floor where her room was.

“I almost forgot. I have a present for you guys,” I said to Juliet. It was best to avoid Hayden’s eyes. They were dangerous floodwaters you might be swept into. “A belated wedding gift. Dinner, tomorrow night? Saturday night date? The Lighthouse. Romantic evening, whatever.”

“That’s really nice, Scarlet,” Hayden said. “You don’t have to do that.”

“I want to,” I said to Juliet. “Tomorrow? I’ll babysit, ha.”

“It’s got to be tomorrow?” Juliet said.

“We’ll take it, if you don’t want it,” Dean Neuhaus said. He chuckled to himself like he had just made a great big fat joke.
We’ll
, meaning Mom and him. Sometimes the word
we
could feel poisonous.

“I didn’t say I didn’t want it,” Juliet said. She couldn’t stand him either.

“You have a secret trust fund, girl? That’s a big gift,” Hayden said.