The Six Rules of Maybe

capable of getting gushy about our old microwave.
    “If you want,” Mom said, but she sounded pleased. She shoved her chair back and went upstairs. I could hear the weight of her footsteps above us, the creak in the floor where her room was.
    “I almost forgot. I have a present for you guys,” I said to Juliet. It was best to avoid Hayden’s eyes. They were dangerous floodwaters you might be swept into. “A belated wedding gift. Dinner, tomorrow night? Saturday night date? The Lighthouse. Romantic evening, whatever.”
    “That’s really nice, Scarlet,” Hayden said. “You don’t have to do that.”
    “I want to,” I said to Juliet. “Tomorrow? I’ll babysit, ha.”
    “It’s got to be tomorrow?” Juliet said.
    “We’ll take it, if you don’t want it,” Dean Neuhaus said. He chuckled to himself like he had just made a great big fat joke. We’ll , meaning Mom and him. Sometimes the word we could feel poisonous.
    “I didn’t say I didn’t want it,” Juliet said. She couldn’t stand him either.
    “You have a secret trust fund, girl? That’s a big gift,” Hayden said.
    “A secret second job.”
    “Pet Palace?”
    “Did my belt buckle give me away?”
    He laughed. I’d forgotten about not looking at him. And, God, I did like looking at him. “Nice to involve us in private jokes, people,” Juliet said.
    “I’m not sure elopement requires a gift,” Dean Neuhaus said.
    “Well, then, that decides it for sure. If elopement doesn’t requirea gift. Tomorrow,” Hayden said.
    “Good,” I said. Good. Settled. I set my napkin down on the table, a napkin period at the end of a dinnertime sentence.
    “This is one of the first ones I did,” Mom said, as she walked back in. She looked around at us and paused; she caught the moment of something in the air, decided to dismiss it just as quickly. She hated conflict as much as I did, maybe more. She placed the book in front of Hayden, leaned over him as he opened the pages.
    “Prague,” she said. “Well. You can see.”
    “Wow,” he said.
    “Nineteen twenties Paris. Etcetera, etcetera …” She started flipping pages.
    “Wait,” he said. “Slow down.”
    It could have been embarrassing, this show. I remembered the time she’d spent on these, her head bent down over pages, the glue stick in her hand. Concentration that seemed to mean a mission I couldn’t really understand and maybe wasn’t meant to. It wasn’t a mission that had anything to do with me. I hadn’t really looked at them in a long time; maybe I hadn’t really looked at them ever. It was just Mom doing an inexplicable Mom thing—listening to “Be” for the millionth time, exercising on a beach towel in front of the TV, buying a new scarf or hat, something we knew she’d never wear (and, of course, didn’t ever wear), and then later shoving it into the closet with the rejected cowboy boots and animal print leggings and lime suede skirt.
    But looking at the scrapbooks again, I saw something else, something I’d never appreciated before. The pages were collages of postcards and cut-out letters and bits of things—small shells and sand glued down in swirls. A key, a stamp, a picture of a clock face or train schedule. They seemed old, made of memories, places andexperiences of a long life lived. The life of an interesting person with stories and secrets. But not the person who stood above Hayden, chopsticks holding up her hair, two deep lines now on her forehead that I hadn’t noticed before, wearing an old tank top I remembered since elementary school. That person wanted things she had never gotten. I could see that now.
    “I always thought they were beautiful,” Juliet said.
    “Really?” Mom said.
    “Paris,” Hayden read. He turned the page. “Morocco.”
    “I never knew you went to Morocco,” Dean Neuhaus pouted. The idea seemed to bother him.
    “Oh, I never did. Only time I’ve been out of the country was Canada,” she said.
    “You never went to any of these places?” Dean Neuhaus couldn’t imagine the point. He squinted in the direction of the book, but you knew he couldn’t even see it from where he sat.
    “It’s about art ,” Hayden said. “It requires imagination .”
    “Not that I wouldn’t love to go,” she said. “I would have loved to go.”
    “Of course you would,” Hayden said. “Of course. You were raising kids. You couldn’t, is all.”
    I was watching Mom’s face, so I saw what happened when she heard those words. Of