The Six Rules of Maybe

knew pretty well what was going on inside my head, I thought, just maybe I didn’t always want to know. You can shield your eyes from an accident and still know the accident is there.Zeus was sitting right in front of the utensil drawer. I nudged him and he scooted to the side. “Sorry, boy.”
    Hayden pointed at me with the can of peaches. “Hey. You’re a person who apologizes to dogs.”
    “I probably apologize to everything.”
    “I’m positive that the world is made up of those who apologize to dogs and those who don’t.”
    “I apologize to this azalea in the front yard every time I run over it backing out of the driveway.”
    He laughed. “Hmm. A plant apologizer. This might blow my theory all to hell. Spatula?” I pointed, and he took one out of the drawer.
    “Can you imagine if you one day apologized to Zeus and he said, ‘Hey man, no problem’?” I said. The idea pleased me, dogs talking.
    “I wonder what his voice would sound like,” Hayden said. The bacon was beginning to sizzle nicely and the orange juice sat ready in our old pitcher and new toast had been pushed down into the toaster. Hayden cut a hunk of butter and plopped it into a second pan for eggs. The kitchen was humming with a nice busy importance.
    “Wouldn’t it be great, though, if you could have an actual conversation with him?”
    Hayden and I looked over at Zeus. Sometimes you were sure dogs had some secret, superior intelligence, and other times, like right then, you knew they were only their simple, goofy selves. Zeus looked back at us, a bit blank but hopeful, wondering if something was going to happen that involved him.
    “I’m not sure we’d want that,” Hayden said. He gave Zeus a long look. “Nah. He’d start doing all the things you hate in people. Bitching, complaining …”
    “Get me off of this leash! Who do you think I am?” I said.
    “This food tastes like shit ,” Hayden said.
    We were laughing when Mom came downstairs. Her brown hair was wet from a shower and she was already dressed in capris and a T-shirt. She gave me a look that said she didn’t approve of me liking Hayden when she hadn’t figured out yet whether she liked him or not herself. Mom was what you’d call fiercely protective . I know this was supposed to be a good thing and I appreciated some of its positive qualities, but it didn’t always feel like a good thing. It was hard to do “big things” in the world when she was on the other side of the street, wringing her hands.
    Mom fluffed her hair with her fingers to get it to dry and looked around at the breakfast taking shape.
    “Well, this was awfully nice of you,” she said to him.
    “I hope you’re hungry,” he said.
    She cruised around the kitchen looking at some mail on the counter and then at a cellophane bag of overripe bananas. She tossed them into the trash. “I was going to make banana bread,” she said. “I don’t even like banana bread.”
    “No one really likes banana bread,” Hayden said. “You know who makes banana bread? The few people in the world who feel guilty about black bananas.”
    I watched the corner of Mom’s mouth go up in a little smile. For the record, the only time I ever saw my mother smile at Buddy Wilkes was the time we saw him pulled over to the side of the rode by Officer Beaker, the red light on the patrol car spinning slowly, telling everyone who passed that Buddy had finally been caught at something.
    It seemed like Hayden was just going to be one of those few, few, few people who just kept getting better the more you saw ofhim. And even Mom, who could see danger in an unwashed apple, could tell that.
    I had to wake up Juliet for breakfast. She was the same lump in her bed I remembered from when she lived at home and had stayed out late the night before. And when I called her name and threw one of her stuffed animals at her butt, I heard a muffled “Goddamnit, Scarlet” from way down in the covers, just like the old days too. But when she sighed and sat up, she looked different to me. It felt like the past but not the past, because she looked like a woman, somehow. Maybe because I expected her to be a woman now, but maybe not just that. Her face looked older, like she’d been somewhere and back, and not just to Oregon, either. She rubbed one eye with her hand and said, “Oh yeah,” as if her life had just returned to her, the way it does sometimes when you first wake up. I wasn’t sure, though, if it was her old life