The Six Rules of Maybe

good … If I never heard that goddamned Neil Diamond again it would be too soon.
    The tick of Mom’s gas gauge was as far into the red as it would go, so dangerously low that it was Dean-Neuhaus-would-never-do-this low. My psychology books would call this passive-aggressive behavior, subtly striking back at someone who seems more powerful, only my mother was getting it wrong, because she was the only one who was sure to be punished. I pulled into Abare’s, which we all still called Eugene’s, since that’s what the gas station had been for a hundred years before the old guy died. It was sold after he was gone and a mini-mart was put in, and the only thing that stayed the same was that they still hired guys from our high school to pump gas for elderly ladies like Cora Lee from the Theosophical Society and Mrs. Dubbs, who worked in the deli at Johnny’s Market. Buddy worked at Eugene’s, too, but I didn’t see either him or his car. I pulled into the lane marked SELF-SERVE , chugged gas into Mom’s tank as the wavy lines of fuel fumes made a psychedelic escape.
    “Hey,” a voice called. I assumed not to me. Maybe someone wasshouting to the chunky motorcyclist in his chunky leather jacket.
    “You.”
    I looked up. It was Jason Dale, a guy who had graduated a few years ago, one of Buddy’s friends. He obviously didn’t know my name, but I knew things about him. He’d been a hard-core partier. He’d gone out with Renny Williams’s sister, Wendy, and some people said she’d gotten an abortion. Juliet thought he was an idiot. She thought all Buddy’s friends were idiots.
    “Aren’t you Juliet Ellis’s sister?”
    “Yeah,” I said. If I had business cards, that’s pretty much what they’d read.
    “Is it true she’s back in town? Someone said they saw her.”
    I played a mental chess match, with Hayden on my team. I calculated how long that news would take to reach Buddy. I hung up the gas pump. “Nope. Someone saw wrong.”
    “Shopping downtown?” He still sounded hopeful.
    “She’s in Mexico,” I said.
    “Oh cool.” He rubbed his angled cheeks with his palms as if feeling for a nonexistent beard.
    “Yeah.” I was ready to expand on my story. I had her singing for some cruise line, docked in Aruba and heading out to sea where she would be unreachable for months, but the details didn’t prove necessary. Jason Dale walked back to the mini-mart without a good-bye; his jeans droopy in the back like Clive Weaver’s bare skin. The motorcyclist gunned his engine and arced out of the lot.
    I got back in Mom’s Honda Accord. I moved the seat and changed the radio station because I knew she didn’t like that. I turned the radio up loud enough to feel it thrum inside my body. I needed music that loud sometimes, loud enough to feel like a heartbeat.
    I didn’t really know where I was going. Not to Nicole’s or Jasmine’s. If I had a father, I thought, this would be the time I would go to wherever he was. It was not the kind of thought I usually allowed myself. It was stupid. But this time I gave myself a pass for one visiting-my-perfect-father fantasy. I tried it on for about two seconds until it felt like I was wearing a silly and pointless hat in public. Awkward, embarrassing, never mind.
    Instead I drove over to Point Perpetua Park. I had another fantasy on the way—me putting Jitter into a baby seat and driving far away where I could make sure he was never around unhappy parents. I would buy him soft clothes and read him books and teach him to aim high. It was still early evening, and the light was just dimming to twilight and turning thoughtful. I walked down the forested path and out to the beach. An older lady with poofy white hair walked with her small poofy, white-haired dog, and Bea Martinsen, who told fortunes at the Sunday market, sat at one of the benches eating a take-out hamburger from one of Pirate’s Plunder’s bags. When I reached the beach, I saw a couple who looked like they were having an argument and the guy who always played the bagpipes around town, who now sat on the sand and watched the waves. I picked my way over to the rock where Hayden and I had sat. A small collection of shells was up there—someone had been there since we had and had forgotten their treasures.
    The water was choppy, and the waves were traveling at a rambunctious angle. A tanker inched by in the distance. The wide sea and rocks and beach should have set things right for me, that’s how it