The Six Rules of Maybe

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-watcherfinds 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, andshe 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