The Six Rules of Maybe

countless times she’d come home with her hair smashed up and tangled and her makeup long gone, and sometimes I’d actually catch her and Buddy on the couch in our living room. There would be a panicked flurry of jumping up and adjusting clothes and Buddy looking around on the floor with one hand for his shirt that had fallen, wearing underwear so tight he could have been on the swim team. But this was different, even though Juliet was married now. Hayden wasn’t Buddy or Adam Christ or Harrison Somebody. He was more real. He had strong-looking shoulders, and life goals, and a dog he scruffed under the neck and crooned at. He wasn’t some idea of a man, he actually was a man. It made that closed bedroom door—
    “Morning,” Hayden said from the kitchen.
    “Oh!” I said. I felt some weird relief at the sight of him standing there in his jeans and his favorite soft green T-shirt, his cheeks stubbly and unshaven, his hair a bird’s nest tangle of curls. Assumptions were sometimes tricky territory.
    “I’m afraid this coffeepot may have stopped working.” He was holding an empty cup, World’s Best Mom written on it, with a picture of a trophy cup. Mother’s Day from a thousand years ago.
    “Mom unplugs it every night,” I said.
    He shook his head to indicate he couldn’t believe his own stupidity, looked behind the coffeepot, and lifted the cord up as evidence that I was right. “I see,” he said. And then: “Every night?”
    “She’s convinced it will burst into flames.”
    “Mothers,” he said.
    “Mothers,” I agreed. “Do you have one? I mean, where is yours? Are yours. Your parents?” It was true what Mom had said—we didn’t know anything about him. He could have been raised by wolves for all we knew. I got a cereal bowl, poured breakfast. Mom had already gone to work, and if I wasn’t waiting at the curb in fifteen minutes, Derek would drive on without me.
    “I don’t see my father much anymore. Not a great guy. Actually, a bad man. You know.” I did. “Mom is in Portland. She’s a sculptor. Really good. She’s getting pretty successful now, I’m proud to say.”
    “How does she feel about …” I waved my arm in a circle.
    It was quiet except for that stupid crow. He was cawing along and then got frenzied as crows do sometimes, the caws turning into that garble-garble strangled-turkey sound. Zeus leaped to his feet and trotted out to the kitchen window as if to protect us from imminent danger. In his mind, as long as he kept his eye on things, we’d be safe.
    “That crow,” Hayden said. “Turkey murder.”
    “I was just thinking the exact same thing,” I said.
    I thought for a moment he would skip the answer to my question, but he finally spoke after the coffeepot began to burble. “Mom’s um … disappointed. I’m the only child, and this isn’t how she saw things going. Or how I did, honestly. She offered to help so we could stay in Portland, but Juliet …” He shrugged a well-you-know-how-this-story-ends shrug.
    “But I guess you and Juliet have that in common,” I said.
    “We both have disappointed mothers?” Hayden leaned with his back against the counter as he waited for the coffee. Zeus turned his attention back to him, looked up at Hayden as if he was the center of everything great—steaks and dog biscuits and shady spots andcar rides.
    “Fathers. You know.”
    “Asshole fathers?”
    “Absent ones.”
    “Mine was around; he just wasn’t a nice guy.”
    “Maybe we had it better, then. We didn’t know what kind of guy he was.”
    “You knew he was a coward,” Hayden said.
    My chest filled with an unfamiliar feeling. Something large. It was the great rising flood you feel when the kid you know is cheating from you gets caught, or when the creep driver who’s been riding your tail gets pulled over. I didn’t answer him right away, though. It wasn’t something I liked to think about. But the place he’d just brought me to was a great place, where he was standing up to the bully just by speaking the truth.
    “A coward?” I said.
    “Absolutely, Scarlet.”
    He held my eyes, driving his point home. I looked down. All the greatness was too much suddenly; the awareness of how much his words meant embarrassed me.
    “Anyway,” I said. “You and Juliet. A match made in childhood.”
    The coffeepot filled cheerfully. Hayden tilted his head and narrowed his eyes at me. “There you go again,” he said. “Jesus. Nothing much passes you by, does