The Six Rules of Maybe (21 page)

I was bent over and my arms were crossed against my stomach, and I wasn’t even looking at him because I was laughing so hard and trying to be quiet at the same time. And that’s when I felt each of his hands behind me on my shoulders, giving them a shake, the way a father might shake the shoulders of a kid he was joking with. But then he turned me around and I turned to him and we hugged there. We hugged for a moment and then he released me and he was still grinning.

I had felt his back under the flat of my hands, his soft shirt, my cheek ever so briefly against him, there where his heart was. He had held me, and I had held him, too. God, it felt good
, it did. I had let want in, opened the door ever so slightly. But want without the belief you can get what you want is pointless. You have to have hope, so I let that in too. You
have
to. To want things and go for them and believe, even in impossible situations … Hope was what you had when you had nothing else. Hope was the perfect shiny top on the Christmas tree, the glowing halo of every wish, the endless beacon of a lighthouse bringing tormented ships home at last.

Chapter Seventeen

A
re you disappointed about tonight?” Juliet asked me. We were outside in the backyard, and Hayden was grilling hamburgers on our old barbecue that no one had used in a hundred years. Smoke billowed every now and then, as if in some occasional frightening emergency. There was that summer smell of briquettes and Hayden’s open beer and the coconut suntan lotion on Juliet’s arms. Mom had music playing, and it came outside through the screen door. Juliet wore one of Mom’s old aprons, and it showed off her bulge. Hayden rubbed it when she passed, like it would give him good luck.

“Disappointed?”

“
Prom
.”

“How’d you even know it was tonight?” Hayden asked.

“Rebecca’s little sister?” Juliet said. “I do have
friends
here.”

Hayden let this go. His eyes were watery from smoke, and he wiped them with the sleeve of his T-shirt.

“I’m not disappointed,” I said. “I move on quickly. I’m not one of those people who really cares about stuff like that.” Actually, I was happy. Really happy. I had that excited feeling, the one you used to get when you were a kid and it was Halloween night. I’d even offered to mow the front lawn so I wouldn’t miss a thing. I couldn’t wait to see Goth Girl and Bomb Boy all dressed up and heading out to dinner. I’d seen Kevin Frink at school and offered him the money I’d promised for dinner. He’d refused it. He wanted to take Fiona to the Harbor Tower instead, the nicest restaurant on the island. He had a hickey on his neck, just above the collar of his T-shirt.

“Well, you can hang out with us if you’re feeling depressed,” Juliet said.

We all sat on Mom’s checkered tablecloth laid out on the grass and ate dinner on paper plates. I wolfed down my hamburger and the potato salad that Mom made and hurried out of there. I changed into my old ragged shorts that used to belong to Juliet and this T-shirt I’d had for a billion years, hauled the push mower out from the garage. I hooked up the grass catcher and looked for a second garden glove just to pass the time.

When I heard Kevin Frink’s Volkswagen come down the street, I realized how anxious I was. Both my stomach and heart were doing the tango surges of nerves. Kevin parked and got out in his big black tux, his hair smoothed back on his large head. Shiny shoes. He must have lost weight in the last few weeks—his usual large, bulky overhang seemed contained or at least well hidden. I bet he even smelled like cologne. He carried a small gold corsage box in one hand.

“Kevin!” I shouted.

I put both thumbs in the air, shook them in victory. Kevin did a very non-Kevin thing. He spun a full circle on the bottoms of those shoes, showing me the whole look. I wanted to applaud. I wanted
to take pictures and show them to all the relatives.

“Fantastic!” I said instead. “You look great!”

He grinned. “I’m not dancing, so you know,” he said, and then he walked up to Fiona’s door. He rang the bell, and Mrs. Saint George answered. She wasn’t smiling. She shook his hand and let him in and the door closed.

I cut six or seven stripes of lawn, stopping the
flick-flick-flick
of blades often. Our yard was small, and I needed to do slow-motion mowing or the task wouldn’t last. Finally, the Saint George door opened, and there was the sound of conversation. Kevin said something that made Mr. Saint George laugh a hearty obligation laugh. Fiona’s mother chirped a few words in response.

And then there was Fiona herself. I actually gasped. She wasn’t wearing the fluffy pink number she’d drawn in chalk, but a sleek apricot dress that clung tightly to a body she’d never before shown underneath her usual sweatshirts and jeans. Her raven black hair was swooped up, and her bangs were sprayed across to show her deep eyes rimmed with her dark eyeliner. She was a little uncertain in her shoes, holding a bit of Kevin Frink’s tux sleeve to steady herself. But she looked beautiful. Goth Girl looked
beautiful
.

I went back to my lawn mowing as they drove away. I finished in two seconds. When I was done, I sat down on the short, scratchy grass and looped my arms around my legs. I felt so satisfied. The night was sweet summer light. When Jeffrey and Jacob came out to play, when Jacob laid down on the sidewalk with his legs straight together and his arms flung out, and said, “Look, I’m Jesus on the sidewalk,” I actually smiled.

For a good while after Kevin Frink and Fiona Saint George drove off together in that car, I was sucked right into the whole idea that said the Prom was the end of that story, same as the Wedding
was the end of the story. But there was something big and long and important called After the Prom and After the Wedding which was basically all the time that came beyond dancing in uncomfortable shoes. Of course, sometimes
after
isn’t long and important. Sometimes it’s brief and shattering.
After
is fate’s own personal cinematic moment, the one when you’re sure the movie is over and the bad guy is dead and gone forever but when he pops back up instead, reaching for the knife on the floor beside him.

School got out, and summer eased all the way in, and I worked most days helping at Quill Stationers. On my days off, I continued to make progress on the Clive Weaver project, to read psychology books about how to fall out of love. I listened to Jeffrey and Jacob ride their bikes over wooden ramps, fight and make up, ride their bikes again. I watched Juliet grow round, watched her hand move to her stomach when she’d feel the fluttery butterfly movements of the baby that we could finally feel too, if we held still long enough.

The construction workers over the back fence kept working on the house behind us. The songs from their radio—
You can’t always get what you wa-aant …
—were our summer sound track, along with the noise of lumber dropping and hammers against nails and the
keshank
of a shovel into gravel. There was the perpetual smell of newly sawed wood. Joe, the miserable ice-cream man, made increasingly insistent loops around our streets now that school was out. Juliet and Hayden went to see Dr. Crosby, and we got our first real picture of Jitter, a black-and-white sonogram image—a tiny curled-up body with small fists, an image that looked more like an incoming weather system than a baby.

And then things were different.

I heard Mr. and Mrs. Martinelli’s garage door lift on its squeaky hinges as I sat outside on the lawn waiting for Juliet. Soon, Mr. Martinelli was bringing out card tables, unfolding their thin metal legs.

“Lemonade stand?” I joked, but he didn’t hear me. He was focused. Mrs. Martinelli called out something to him from the garage, and then they began hauling out armloads of stuff to the now upright tables—crystal dishes and old suits, blocky clock radios and record albums, a TV that looked heavy enough to anchor a ship.

They both disappeared inside the house, and then there they were again, struggling to get a large wood bed frame out the door. Mr. Martinelli was sweating.

“Slow down, sugar,” Mrs. Martinelli said. She could bite when she wanted to—I’d heard her snip and nag at him over the years, in ways that made you feel bad for him. But her words were patient this time. Cheerful, even.

“Do you need some help?” I called. I could just see them both having a heart attack right there. I tried to remember how many times you were supposed to compress the chest and how many times you were supposed to blow into the mouth. “Just a sec.” I jogged over.

Mr. Martinelli puffed air out of his cheeks. “It’s not that heavy, sweet pea,” he said to Mrs. Martinelli. But he looked relieved to set it down.

“You always were my muscle man,” she said to him.

I lifted Mrs. Martinelli’s end easily. “What is it?” I asked.

“Our old water bed,” Mr. Martinelli said. “Set it by the curb. This oughta draw the folks in.”

“What are you guys doing?”

“A little housecleaning,” Mrs. Martinelli said.

“A little housecleaning,” Mr. Martinelli repeated.

They looked guilty. I couldn’t figure out why, unless they’d just held up a Saint Vincent de Paul truck. I poked around a Tupperware container of old-guy tools and a dish of necklaces. A stained-glass lamp, a fondue pot, macramé plant hangers, saucepans …

“Hey, you guys had this in there.” I held it up. I think it was a picture of their grandkids. One of those creepy, stiff images of two kids sitting at an angle against a blue photographer’s backdrop. The little boy wore a plaid tie and a navy blue vest; the little girl had a matching plaid dress. “Probably don’t want to get rid of this, right?”

“Someone might want the frame,” Mrs. Martinelli said.

“Two bucks,” Mr. Martinelli offered.

“No thanks,” I said. We had our own relatives.

“Cute kids, though,” Mrs. Martinelli said. She hunched over a table with a fat marker in her plump hand.

I set the picture down. I was poking through a dish of groovy old-lady earrings when I heard the slow squeal of bike brakes behind me.

“Hey.”

I turned. “Oh!” Straddling his bike, right there, was Jesse Waters, Shy, on my own street on my own Saturday morning. Nicole was going to be pissed. He shook his dark hair out of his eyes.

“I was just riding around,” he said. “Okay, that’s probably pretty obvious, since, you know, I’m on a bike… .”

I did a mental inventory of how stupid I might possibly look. Since Juliet and I were about to take the ferry into the city, I had reasonable clothes on. Makeup, check; teeth brushed, okay; all was pretty well. “Do you live around here?”

“Not too far,” he said. “I saw the signs.” He pointed. I looked in the direction of his finger. Whoa—I don’t know how I’d missed them. Signs were on the telephone poles and streetlights, going
down the street and heading around the corner.
GARAGE SALE! EVERYTHING MUST GO!
Red paint on pieces of thin cardboard.

“Those look like cereal boxes,” I said.

“Yep,” he said. “One fell off a telephone pole two streets over. Frosted Mini-Wheats.”

“Mr. Martinelli’s favorite,” Mrs. Martinelli said. She was listening in.

“What?” Mr. Martinelli shouted from the garage.

“FROSTED MINI-WHEATS!” she shouted back to him.

“I thought maybe you were the garage sale,” Jesse said. He got off his bike, laid it down.

“Nope. Not us. We’re sale-less.” I gestured over to our driveway, which was empty except for Hayden’s truck and the Neilsons’ cat lurking around its tires.

But I’d caught what he’d just said. He knew where I lived. I knew what that meant. I was only pretending not to know what that meant to buy myself a little time to figure out how I felt about what that meant. And how
did
I feel? Well, I wasn’t so sure, but I picked up one of Mr. Martinelli’s cuff links anyway. It was very large and silver and had a fat chunk of turquoise in its center.

“This would be nice for you,” I said.

“If there was only a tie clip to match.” He grinned.

“Two dollars,” Mr. Martinelli said. He emerged from the garage carrying a box labeled
CHRISTMAS DECORATIONS
.

“Oh, let him have it, sugar. He’s Scarlet’s friend.”

“Whatever you say, sweet pea.”

“That’s the man I married.”

I rolled my eyes in Jesse’s direction. I’d never seen them so lovey dovey before. Usually, they were either ignoring each other or doing the functional back and forths that I guessed were what was
left after a long life together. I wondered what happened. Maybe you just woke up one day from fifty years of TV watching and gutter cleaning and table clearing and realized that you had to have a garage sale and that you were in love. Maybe there was hope for Juliet and Hayden. Someday when they both had white, poofy dandelion hair, Juliet would look at Hayden and realize the depths of her true feelings.

“Those will look very handsome,” Mrs. Martinelli said to Jesse. “We got those on our trip to Arizona.” She searched around for the pen cap.

“Under your chair,” I said. I smiled, shrugged, and handed Jesse the single cuff link. Who knew where the other one was.

“Thank you very much,” Jesse said to Mrs. Martinelli.

“Look through the record albums. I think we have Bay City Rollers.”

Jesse bent his head to attach the cuff link to the pocket of his denim jacket, next to the silver snap.

“That will look very handsome,” I whispered. He grinned.

He looked up and we had an awkward moment, where you’re both in that vacant space where there are a thousand things to say and nothing to say.

“I should go.”

“I’m heading out to—” Our door opened then, and Zeus came charging out, and Hayden yelled, “Catch him!” and I lunged, but Jesse caught his collar with one quick hand.

“God! Sorry guys. Prison break,” Hayden said. One thing about Zeus, he completely broke training when the front door opened. You had to walk out sideways, or he’d shove through and run for it. He was fearless about going after what he wanted. Who cared about streets and cars and the chance of death when there was all that open,
endless space full of high speed possibilities?