The Six Rules of Maybe

after he was required to pay the Saint Georges a huge fine. Joe, the ice-cream man, came around less and less during that last week. Things were ending. The sun seemed different in a way you don’t have words for, and I knew that summer was really over. Things could slip away, I realized, and that’s when I went to Randall and Stein and picked out a book on Roman history and carried it in itsgreen bag to the Parrish Island Pool.
    Jesse Waters was right there in the ticket booth, not in the high lifeguard chair where I had imagined this scene taking place. So I got in line. I watched him. It was a moment that sat between before and after again; but when he looked up and saw me and he broke into a wide smile, after was right there, right then.
    “Can you wait a couple of minutes?” he said. I nodded. I sat out on the hill of grass by the ticket booth, watching the little kids with towels around their necks and girl babies in frilly suits sitting in the crooks of their mothers’ arms. When Jesse came out, I gave him the book.
    “You noticed?” he said. I nodded. I was the one who felt shy. We sat together and talked. I felt the crackle of energy between us. This was my own life, not Juliet’s, done in my own way, and I went toward it.
    The conversation stopped. I didn’t want it to. What was your most embarrassing moment? I remembered Hayden that night, smoke lifting skyward. I tried again. I said it aloud. Jesse laughed.
    “Oh God,” he groaned. “I don’t know if I can tell you this.”
    “I promise I won’t tell anyone but a few thousand of my closest friends,” I said.
    “Okay, but you’ve got to promise,” he said. I waited. He took my hand, turned it over, and traced my palm as if he were Bea Martinsen who read fortunes at the Sunday market. “Middle school,” he said.
    “Oh no,” I said. Everyone knew that was the worst time for an embarrassing moment.
    “Uh-huh. We had to write a poem.”
    “Oh no.” I started to giggle.
    “Had to hand it to a partner to read aloud to the entire class.”
    “Oh God,” I said. I was giggling pretty hard.
    He paused. “Instead of huge beast , I had written huge breast .”
    “No!” I laughed loud and hard. He put an arm around my neck, pulled me close. It felt so good. Part of me lifted right up, like those dreams where you fly.
    “You promised, right? Only a few thousand?”
    We laughed together until we weren’t laughing anymore. I felt his warm breath on my face. He leaned in to kiss me. It was my own kiss, a right and truthful one. Soft and sweet and long—I couldn’t believe it and then I could. Just like that; it was easy.
    On October sixteenth, at 2:35 in the morning, Tess Elizabeth Renfrew was born in a Portland hospital, with her father there to catch her. Mom and I arrived in Portland later that morning. It was the first time I had seen Hayden since he had left in his truck, and none of us could look at one another without our eyes filling. Jitter, now Tess, slept in a tight bundle in a plastic bed on wheels near Juliet. She had rosebud lips. When Hayden unwrapped her so that we could look, we saw her scrawny little chicken legs and tiny, tiny fingernails and arms that flailed at the sudden freedom. She wore a knit hat on her head, which Hayden pulled off carefully so that we could see her funny sweet head with dark hair like Hayden’s.
    “Beautiful, beautiful baby Tess,” he sang to her as he wrapped her back up tight. She made gritchy little sounds, and he beamed at us to see if we heard them too. Juliet looked tired, her tummystill round but deflated. She lay her head back on the pillows and smiled.
    “Zeus is a big brother dog now,” I said. I still missed him.
    “He can teach Tess her first words,” he said, caught my eye, and grinned. “We know he can actually talk. We know it.”
    “Yeah, we do,” I said. “He can probably play the piano, too.”
    Hayden laughed. “Sneaky canine bastard.” Tess—she was lucky to have him. Juliet, too. All of us were.
    We held the baby package and smelled the top of her head and handed her back to Juliet, who seemed suddenly to know what to do. She held her baby like she was a Tess expert. She would hand the baby back to Hayden and he would take her. They were working it out, the two of them.
    Mom and I rode back down the elevator a few hours later and found our car in the hospital parking garage. I didn’t want to leave Tess yet. The million pictures I took didn’t seem enough. I