The Six Rules of Maybe (7 page)

“Uh-oh,” Hayden said as he locked the door of the truck.

“I know.”

“I always wondered how those guys actually made any money,” he said.

“There you go.”

He came around the other side of the truck and stopped for a second, set his hand on my arm. “Scarlet.”

Some things had the right amount of weight. A quilt as you slept, carefully chosen words, fingertips.

“I really want to thank you. It’s a little weird for me here. You know—all of it. What’s going on, a new place, the whole deal. But you made it great today, and I really appreciate that.”

His eyes were warm and brown as coffee. I looked at them for a long while and he looked back. I felt something from him that you don’t feel very often. I guess it was sincerity.

“No problem, Hayden,” I said.

He let my arm go. He went inside to find Juliet. But I could still feel his touch there on my skin, lingering for a moment before fleeing, the way a good dream does, just as you wake.

Chapter Six

Y
ou two got sunburned,” Juliet said at dinner. Juliet was in a bad mood, and I remembered then what Juliet in a bad mood looked like. Her temper rolled in, clouds over sky, first hazy and meandering and then dark and full and fixed. Juliet’s bad moods were irritation and dissatisfaction looking for a purpose. In other people, in me, irritation needed something to grab on to or else it just faded away with a cold drink or a nap or someone else’s patience. But Juliet seemed to like the thrilling ride from irritation to anger; she searched around for a reason to lose her temper until she found one.

It might have even felt a little good if our mutual sunburn had been what had made her mad. But I could never be a threat to Juliet. I was sure of that. Juliet held men in the palm of her hand. I had no magic tricks or power; I was only my plain old self and didn’t know how to be different than that.

I knew Juliet, anyway. The accumulation of small things that
together make you momentarily hate your life and everyone in it could send her fuming—not finding pants that fit and then spilling her lemonade, or a long, hot day in the car with Mom who never seemed to notice when the light turned green. Juliet had a way too of putting things and people in the space between herself and what was true. If she’d had a fight with Buddy Wilkes, it was me whom she yelled at, and if our mother had upset her, Buddy himself might be the one to get her frosty words. I wondered if Hayden knew this about her yet. It was something a husband ought to know.

“It was a sunny day,” Hayden said. It sounded like an apology, and Hayden shouldn’t have given that. Not just for the obvious reasons but for a bigger one—Buddy Wilkes never took her crap.

“Must be nice to have a day off work,” Dean Neuhaus said. Mom had invited him for dinner. He sat at the end of the table in his pressed pants and pressed shirt, his tie still tight against his throat, his brown hair cut straight across the back of his neck. It was the kind of hair that said you followed the rules.

Dean had sort of been forgotten down there at the end of the table, with his prim, righteous mouth and expensive watch and leather shoes, and Dean Neuhaus didn’t like to be forgotten. One of the things I hated most about Dean was how he’d hint at his moral superiority while at the same time pointing out how humble he was. To Dean Neuhaus,
everything
was a sign of his moral superiority, from the way he loaded the dishwasher to how manicured his fingernails were. Dean Neuhaus had come here from London, and he managed to make our entire country inferior to his too—our grossly abundant restaurant meals, our bad-mannered children, our sloppy and distasteful use of the English language. He was even morally superior about our leftovers—he would never waste food like we did. I located him in my psychology books, the way a bird-watcher
finds the exact bird he’s seen: Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder. King of Order was disordered.

“You always spend so much time at your job, it’d be good for you to have some time off,” my mother said to OCD Dean Neuhaus.

“I don’t take time off when my company needs me. Do you know how hard it is for me to take time off? I have six months of vacation time accrued,” he said. Dean Neuhaus did something with computers at Microsoft, something that obviously made him money. He had an ex wife and two kids, Brenda and Kevin, but we hadn’t met them yet. His real past seemed to be the Volvo he had had before his Lexus, and a Rolex he had once owned that had been stolen.

“I’m so happy that you two had such a great time while I was off being pregnant,” Juliet said.

“Did you like your present Hayden got you?” I asked. My own gift,
What to Expect When You’re Expecting
, sat near her plate, the cover glossy and uncracked.

“Oh right! I almost forgot,” Hayden said. He pushed his chair back, disappeared for a minute.

“So what’s the big present?” Juliet asked.

I ignored her. “Six months is a lot of vacation time,” Mom said.

“My problem is, I just don’t believe a person should think about themselves first,” Dean Neuhaus said to her. He dipped a bit of falafel into some tzatziki sauce. “There’s a lot of garlic in here.”

Mom stabbed her dinner with her knife. She claimed Dean was kind and responsible and had other good qualities, but you never actually witnessed them. Maybe she’d seen them once and just kept hoping they’d reappear, like a rare creature once spotted in the wild.

Hayden reappeared with the purple box. He
was
sunburned, and his nose was a happy red, the kind of red that meant fun and summer and other good things. He stood beside Juliet, holding that box, and
she just looked at it without taking it.

I remembered the note I’d read when we’d returned home that day. I’d snatched it quickly from Juliet’s bedside table, read it in the bathroom with the door shut and locked, returning it to its place immediately afterward. My heart beat fast as I read the words.

Juliet—

I want to wash your hair with a shampoo that smells like fruit—mango, or strawberries. I want to walk on a beach with you, dragging a big stick behind us, making a message in the sand that we try to believe an airplane will really see. I want to kiss saltwater from your lips. I want us to listen to music with our eyes closed; I want to read musty books while lying next to you—books about fascinating things like mummies and eccentric artists and old shipwrecks in the Pacific. I want to have picnics on our bed and crawl into cotton sheets that smell like summer because we left the windows open when we were gone. I want to wake in the night with you and marvel at the stars and try to find the moon through the trees. I want all the sweet things in life. But only by your side.

I thought of the letter as Juliet made a little
hnn
sound, a dismissive sort of exhale. Being impossible to please seemed the worst kind of cruelty right then. When someone gave you everything and it was still not enough, when you made them prove and prove their love again, you were the evil witch of fairy tales; you had snakes for hair and a small stone heart.

“Sweet Violet’s,” Juliet said, looking at the package. “I haven’t seen anything from that place in way too long.”

A moment passed between them. A moment that meant she was giving him information about Buddy Wilkes and about himself and about all the men who she might have let love her. He did an unexpected thing then, a good thing, because he was making it clear he wasn’t a fool. He tossed the box onto the table so that it slid her direction, and then he left the room. His dinner still sat half-eaten at his place. It was quiet, and Juliet just kept eating as if she couldn’t care less or maybe didn’t even notice what we all noticed. You could see a whole relationship sometimes in a moment like that one. You could get all the information you needed in just a few seconds.

“That’s the father of your baby, Juliet Rose,” my mother said.

I thought about Jitter inside there, inside my sister. I hoped he or she was sleeping, or that the watery depths made words and experiences too muffled and foggy to really hear or feel. Juliet put her hand to her stomach, protecting the baby from who knows what. Mom’s judgment, probably. Then again, she probably just had eaten too fast.

“I don’t know why people bother with American chocolates,” Dean Neuhaus said.

*

Dean Neuhaus drove off later in his Lexus, which had, I was sure, exactly the right tire pressure, its floors vacuumed free of any bits of dirt from the shoes of passengers. I saw Juliet in the kitchen, sneaking bites of leftover pie from a few days before, straight out of the pan with a fork.

“Remember when Mom took us to the drive-in movies that one time? She wanted to make sure we went before the theaters were all gone,” Juliet said. Another forkful of pie disappeared. “God, we drove for hours, remember? Some town out in the middle of nowhere. Nothing around but RV World and Boat World and all those worlds that had nothing to do with ours, remember? That
place—Chain Link Fence World.”

It occurred to me that this was the Juliet that Hayden loved. The one that was funny and thoughtful, her bare feet on the wood floor, her eyes calm. When she sang, her voice was so sweet and beautiful, it could break your heart. But I didn’t feel like reminiscing about old times or being open to Juliet’s good qualities. I kept thinking about how happy Hayden had looked on that rock. A person could be such a happiness thief.

“God, you’re a bitch sometimes,” I said.

“What?” she said. She looked honestly perplexed.

“You better be careful. You lose him, and you’re going to be sorry.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You finally found a good guy. Let alone …” I gestured toward her body. “You better not mess it up.”

She looked at me for a moment. She set her mouth in a line. “Don’t think you know anything about this,” she said. “Because you don’t. Not a single thing. What are you, like, seventeen?”

I shot her daggers with my eyes. I hated this trick of hers, a trick she’d been doing forever. When she was eight, I was just a baby kindergartener. When she was in the sixth grade, I was a stupid eight-year-old. When she was in high school, everyone in my middle school looked
so young
. We were
so immature
. And the thing was, every time she did it, it worked. Every time, I felt like the little kid who had to stay at day care when she went off to big school with her backpack and her chin in the air. I didn’t say anything. Just kept shooting my daggers. I was old enough to know what I knew.

She put the pie dish, fork and all, back into the freezer and the door slapped shut. It was amazing, really, how these other people, your family, held huge and great pieces of your own self, your defi
nition, your place in the world. I could be eighty-five, maybe even have done great and powerful things in my life, our mother long gone, and I’d still be who I was in those long ago home videos of us. The one where I was the little kid at my sister’s birthday party with all her friends, or the ones where Mom taped the two of us playing. There we were in our twin footie pajamas tossing dolls and plastic food and trucks from the toy box, and there was Mom’s voice coming loud from her place behind the camera.
What are you guys doing?
she would ask us, and Juliet, the authoritative munchkin, would answer:
We’re going to play doggy and owner
, or something like that. My voice would come next, always next, this small echo,
Play doggy
. Juliet was always in the lead, and I was her echo. Always. And she was in the lead again, right that moment, when she turned and left the room, taking all of our history with her.

My window was open, and I could hear the crickets outside, making the just-right sounds of a still May evening. You could smell the temperature change through the screen, the air turning from daytime grassy and warm to cool and wet, with that spring night smell of darkness and ripe fruit. That smell always made me feel things deeply, possibility and despair, even way back when I was a kid and didn’t know those words. You just felt it anyway, something big, something about life that maybe didn’t have a name yet.

The book I had given to Juliet had lain abandoned on the kitchen table after everyone had left, and so I picked it up and brought it to my room. I propped on my bed and read.

Week three: Your soon-to-be-baby has started its miraculous transformation from single cell to baby boy or girl. This week, the fertilized egg—
or zygote—divides several times over to become a tiny ball of microscopic cells smaller than the period at the end of this sentence.

Week four: The blastocyst that will be your baby splits to form the placenta and the embryo, and the specialized parts of your baby’s body begin to develop.

Jitter had been going through eons of evolution before we even knew he or she existed. It felt important to know these things about him or her. Him or her. Which, I wondered? How do you picture a person in your mind without knowing this? I decided to refer to Jitter in my mind as a he, the generic
he
, the
he
in books that meant neither he nor she, just a someone. It seemed important to decide and clarify this, even in my mind. It seemed the best way to show how welcome he was, no matter what.

I read further.
As the first trimester comes to a close, your baby’s about the size of a peach.
I thought about a peach wrapped in a soft blanket. I thought about wheeling a peach around in a baby carriage. I pictured me and the peach baby in the park, park ladies leaning in to look, cooing with love and envy. I found myself reading the next few paragraphs over and over again, the way you do when you haven’t been paying attention. I wasn’t thinking about babies or peaches, then, I was thinking about what it might be like to have someone wash your hair, a guy someone, a man, fingers through strands, a cool rinse, your hair slicked back, the drip of water down your neck caught by a towel.

That’s when I heard their voices through the wall. Muffled and heavy. The thick crackle of an argument, her and then him. A pause, then rapid fire. More silence and then her again. Buddy Wilkes’s
name said aloud. I listened to Juliet and Hayden and thought about my mother and Dean Neuhaus and my stalker, Reilly Ogden, and Nicole’s parents and even my own parents. I wondered if maybe we were just meant to love the people who would make us most unhappy.