The Six Rules of Maybe

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? Thatplace—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 definition, 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: