The Six Rules of Maybe (25 page)

I wondered if I should deliver the Make Hope and Possibilities Happen for Clive Weaver project sooner than I’d planned. I had folded more than a hundred paper cranes and had twenty or thirty pieces of mail ready for his box. I wasn’t anywhere near my goal yet, and when I closed my eyes I saw it playing the way I imagined, loads of mail, loads of it. Well then, something else had better be done now. A person ought to check up on him anyway.

I went downstairs and made a quick batch of brownies. Too much fat and sugar was bound to be bad for his heart, yet he needed it for his spirit. I licked the bowl as I waited for them to bake, drank a big glass of milk that chased away the bad feelings I had about Juliet and Hayden and Kevin Frink and about Nicole, too, who had been nothing but cold to me since that day at the pool. I had wanted to help all of them, but it seemed like I was failing miserably.

I felt the way you did when you had been swimming for a long time, or running, or working on an endless research paper. Like the end was too far away, the obstacles too great, like you wanted to lie down and rest. But you didn’t rest, right? Or quit. You didn’t do any of those things that meant giving up, because quitting was for losers and babies, for the weak and lazy, for people with no backbone. You persevered, even if there were setbacks and you were tired and didn’t want to do any of it anymore. If you wanted some sort of triumph, you had to be persistent. You had to pay with all of your endless efforts. You had to stick with it. You just worked harder to make it happen, whatever “it” happened to be.

The chocolate was catching up to me.

I cut the brownies into squares and put them on a plate. I carried them outside, their warmth steaming up the Saran Wrap I had stretched over them. But it was true, wasn’t it? It was practically un-American to not set goals and then do everything you could, everything, to reach them.
Quitting
—it was a dirty word in a place where pilgrims had endured harsh winters and where pioneers had struggled through death and disease to create new lives. Giving up or stepping back or setting aside something you thought you wanted—it was almost a shameful act. I wasn’t one of those people who gave up easily. Sometimes it was confidence and not the lack of it that made me want to fix the bad I saw around me. I believed in the power a person had to change things.

Clive Weaver’s blinds were drawn, and the house looked very still. I was surprised, then, when the front door opened and Ally Pete-Robbins stepped outside, holding an empty Bundt pan. She looked at my brownies, and I looked at that pan. I wondered if I could see my future in its curved Teflon surface.

“His condition is worsening,” Ally Pete-Robbins said. But she sounded snippy. My brownies were invading her Bundt cake turf.

“Oh no,” I said.

“He has dishes out from days ago,” she said.

“Maybe somebody ought to wash them,” I said.

“I already did.” Her words closed the conversation. Her shoes clipped back down the sidewalk, sounding useful and efficient. I loved that sound, I had to admit, especially when my own heels were making it. Heels on sidewalks or shiny floors—the sound of important business.

But I wasn’t so much in the mood for visiting anymore. The Saran Wrap was coming unstuck around the edges of the plate, and my stomach felt too full from uncooked batter. I rang the bell,
though, and when Clive Weaver answered in his bathrobe, his old face unshaven, his breath smelling sour, some mix of coffee and soup in cans, I only handed him the plate and said a few words I can’t remember now. Clive said,
That’s mighty kind of you, mighty kind, goddamn
, and I swear his eyes started pooling up, the way old man eyes did after so many years of life piling up. I got out of there. I got out of there, but still I could feel some urgent sense of my decisions following me. The decisions I had made, the decisions I was about to make.

Later that afternoon, the big dark Mercedes pulled up in front of the Martinellis’ house. The realtor lady with realtor lady hair and realtor lady shoes came out and rather forcefully dug a hole into the ground in front of the Martinellis’ yard. She shoved the
FOR SALE
sign into it. I recognized her from all the calendars and magnets and notepads she’d sent in the mail over the years. Yvonne Yolanda, our Friend in the Real Estate Business.

Chapter Twenty

I
waited for the Mercedes to leave. The doorbell sounded far away in the Martinellis’ house. I looked into the glass by the door, waited until the bright flowers on Mrs. Martinelli’s dress appeared. I pounded on the door then. She needed to understand the urgency of this. The moment I saw that sign, I knew what was going on. They were not moving to Arizona or Florida or even Montana, where their daughter lived. They had not bought some condo in the sun to live out their days playing golf and sipping “highballs,” as Mr. Martinelli called the gin drinks he had every night at five thirty.

“Mrs. Martinelli, open up,” I said.

She peeked around the door. She wore her reading glasses on a chain around her neck; her dress was a large shouting garden of sunflowers.

“Why, Scarlet,” she said. She sounded like some old lady on television, which is not how Mrs. Martinelli ever talked.

“What have you done?” I said.

“Whatever do you mean?” she said. “Come in, dear.” I rolled my eyes. Next she would be offering me Freshly Baked Cookies and telling me about The Good Old Days. It was the sweet old folks countermove. A cover-up.

“You know what I mean. The
FOR SALE
sign. Getting rid of all of your stuff. Where is Mr. Martinelli?”

I followed her into the kitchen. It looked empty, and so did the living room. Her collection of glass dogs that had lined the living room shelves was gone. So were the shelves themselves.

“Ginger!” I said. Oh God, what had they done with her? I could just see the small white dog sitting in the passenger seat of Mr. Martinelli’s Buick, heading for the Great Pound in the Sky.

“Don’t get your knickers in a twist; she’s right here.” Mrs. Martinelli whistled somewhere in the back of her teeth, and Ginger appeared, toenails clicking on the linoleum, her blank black eyes shiny behind her aging bimbo-fluff hair.

I put my hand to my chest. “Thank God.”

“Her kidneys are bad, but Mr. Martinelli said if we’d put
him
down when his kidneys got bad, it would have been years ago.”

A tea kettle started to whine in high-pitched need. Mrs. Martinelli removed the kettle from the stove, opened a cupboard to reveal shelves vacant except for four lonely cups. She took two down, set them on the counter.

“Cocoa?” she asked. She ripped open a package of Swiss Miss.

“I knew it,” I said.

“It has the little marshmallows,” she said.

“They are scam artists, Mrs. Martinelli. I don’t know where you’re going, but you’re not going to find any cocoa plantation when you get there.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. We’ve talked to Morin Jude herself. We wouldn’t have just gone and sent that kind of money unless we knew she was a real person. They’re getting the house ready for us on the Ivory Coast. Herb has been reading up on cocoa. You would be surprised how involved it all is.” She poured steaming water into the cups. “The seed is actually green when ripe, not red. Isn’t that interesting?”

“We’ve got to call someone and get your money back.” I looked around. The place was so empty, I’d have bet even the phone was gone.

She opened a drawer, a mostly empty drawer, except for the accumulated bread crumbs and toothpicks still clinging for dear life to their old home. She took out a spoon, stirred the brown dust and unnaturally small white bits that were supposedly marshmallows.

She handed me a cup, which I held but ignored. Mrs. Martinelli sipped. “An inferior product,” she said. Her top lip was spotted with dampened chocolate dust. Ginger still sat at her feet like one waiting slipper. She was apparently still hoping for food, the only thrill of her little day. I always thought it was sort of sad, how thrilled dogs were to have their two meals. Then again, I’d had days where there’d been less excitement.

“Mrs. Martinelli. What you’ve done …” How to get this through to her? “You’ve maybe given away everything.
Everything
, okay? For
nothing
. These people have sold their ‘plantation’ countless times, all right? Countless. We’ve got to contact some authorities. You’ve got to get your money back somehow. Get that sign out of the yard… .”

“You don’t understand. Poor Morin Jude. Her father was
murdered
on that business trip to France. By his own
business partners
.” She drew her finger against her neck to demonstrate. Poor Morin
Jude, all right. Thousands upon thousands of dollars richer.

I sighed. I rubbed my forehead the way Mom always did when there was nothing else to be done. This was a disaster. “You’re going to get hurt here. Please. I care about you; can’t you hear me?”

She put on her glasses, read the ingredients of the box, sighed, then put it back down. “Scarlet, should we stay in this house and just move one day closer and another day closer to being dead?”

I looked into her eyes. I saw that same small, vulnerable person I had seen in Kevin Frink’s. Maybe we all just wanted someone to believe in. That’s all each of us wanted, and it should be so simple, but it never was simple.

“You gave away things to people who don’t have your best interests at heart, Mrs. Martinelli. We can’t give away things to people like that. Your money—you may never see it again.”

“You wouldn’t believe what this has done for our sex life,” she said. She snapped her fingers.

I wanted to clap my hands over my ears. “Oh God.”

“Oh, don’t be a prude, Scarlet. Birds do it, bees do it, even old ladies do it.” She rolled something in her cheek. “They call this a marshmallow?”

“Maybe I should talk to Mr. Martinelli,” I said.

“He’s not here,” she said. “He’s at the consulate picking up our passports. Then he’s dropping off the Buick at Bill Rogers’s house. He paid more than what it was worth. The minute this house sells, we’re outta here.”

I had to get on the phone. There must be something that could be done. It was wrong; that was all. People just couldn’t be taken advantage of like that.

“Swiss Miss,” Mrs. Martinelli scoffed.

“I don’t know what to say,” Mom said. Shoes were strewn all over the rug in my mother’s room, and blouses were tossed onto the bed in small mountains of rejection. I had those moments, too, when nothing,
nothing
looked right or felt right. “I think you have to let other people have their own disasters.”

“Juliet talked to you,” I said. Her words weren’t just about the Martinellis; that was obvious.

“You can’t fix it all, Scarlet. A person can’t hold that much in their own hands. I wish you could.”

“Why can’t a person? I’m sorry; I don’t get that.”

“Why?” She looked at herself in the long mirror on the back of her door. “It’s just, you’ve got to …” She turned back to me. “I don’t know, the idea that we can control things is wishful thinking. Sometimes, there’s nothing that can be done. You can let go; that’s all. Maybe that’s the most important thing to do.”

“That’s chicken shit,” I said. “When something bad is happening, you don’t just give up and let it happen! We know that. We’re
taught
that. Can you imagine a movie where there’s this big war between good and evil and the fighters of good just say, ‘Oh well, there’s nothing that can be done.’ Film over.”

She gave her outfit a dissatisfied glance in the mirror, turned, and looked at me dead-on. “A different film would start. Maybe a more real one. Bad guys do win. Things aren’t fair. There isn’t always some great big terrific something that happens to make everything turn out right.”

“I know that,” I said. It came out sounding sarcastic and childish. Maybe I didn’t really know that or, at least, completely believe it.

“Sweetie,” Mom said. She sighed. She sat down on the edge of her bed. I looked at her in her confused clothes. She seemed very
tired. She had only one shoe on. “We don’t always get what we want.”

This scared me. The one shoe, the sighing, the discarded clothes—it looked like defeat. But what scared me even more was the change in her message—the message we’d heard from the time we were small. You
can
have anything you want. If you thought positively and set your mind to it,
anything was possible
.

“Mom,” I said. “Do you hear yourself? You have to believe in your own power to make things different. You told us that! What about conviction? There’s
proof
, I’ve read about it—thinking positively, setting goals, believing in yourself—people can cure their own
cancers!
You’re the one who said we could do anything we set our mind to … we could have what we wanted if we
believed
and
worked hard
.”

“Optimism can get you into a lot of trouble. You can put your belief in places it doesn’t belong. You can work hard to fix things that you can’t fix. I’m not sure that kind of optimism is always the best thing. Positive thinking, hope—it needs better guidelines. It needs
rules
.”

Something had changed in her, and I wasn’t sure what it was or when it had happened. But I didn’t like where this was going, not at all. Hope and belief were the
good guys
. Weren’t they? If you went to the other side, if you left persistence and optimism in the dust, what could happen? Could Dean Neuhaus happen? What would fate do, what would
you
do, if you set down those Laws of the Universe, the capital
T
Truths? Because maybe in the old days you weren’t supposed to say the world was round, but now you didn’t mess with determination and willpower and reaching goals and thinking positively. What she had said—it was a modern sort of burned-at-the-stake heresy. Everyone knew that those things were the
right things
.

“God, Mom.
Cynical
.”