The Six Rules of Maybe

it up over my stomach and up to my shoulders, where it appeared to be jammed.“Ow,” I said.
    “Are you okay?”
    I managed to get one arm free, hoisted the dress over my head so that it was basically stuck on my face. “God! How do they expect you to get these things off?”
    Juliet laughed. Damn it, she was peeking. “Don’t look!” I said. The dress was hanging on my head like a turban, with one of my arms in the air out the neck hole, when the wailing stopped next door and a face peered under the door.
    “Hi la-dy,” the little kid said.
    “ God! ” I said.
    “Hi-ii,” the kid said again.
    “Go back on your side, honey,” Juliet’s voice was a hostile, too-loud message to the mother next door.
    “Sarah! Come here! Quit that! The lady needs privacy!”
    “Can I have gum?” Benjamin said.
    I finally managed to free the dress, and I stood there, clutching the brown satin to my mostly naked self as the little girl retreated and appeared again, and as I watched Juliet’s face change in a moment from pissed to horrified. She put her fingertips up to her face, as if their touch kept the thoughts in her head.
    “Juliet?”
    She looked ill. I got scared. What did I know about any of this, this pregnancy? Was this some medical emergency? I tried to remember about anything I might have read in What to Expect When You’re Expecting . What if something happened to her right here? What if there was some sort of pregnancy disaster right here in Vibe!?
    “Oh—” It was more a sound than a word. Pain. I didn’t know what to do. I just stood there clutching that strangulating dress andlooking down at her.
    “Tell me,” I said. “What? Are you hurting? Is something going wrong?”
    “I just …”
    “What?”
    “I didn’t think about this,” she said.
    “Juliet, what?” Okay. This was okay. It was an emotional crisis not a physical one.
    “ This .”
    She pointed down to the floor, where a pair of little kid legs now stuck into our dressing room. One of the small pink tennis shoes had the laces undone. The bottom of the other shoe was scribbled on with some sort of ink pen. There was a pink-and-purple swirly Band-Aid on one plump knee, hanging on by only a single sticky end.
    “That kid?”
    Juliet gave a small nod. A tear rolled down her nose. I felt something big then. Something too large to have a name. The weight of mistakes and the lifting heart of compassion. Human beings colliding with the most complicated parts of themselves and the weird bravery of that. I held my sister against that brown satin dress. Held her head as the tears darkened the fabric. I felt all the choices that come out wrong in spite of our small hidden hopes. But I felt something else then too, something for the small someone inside Juliet whom I couldn’t seem to make entirely real. A someone who was growing and becoming in spite of our confusion, a someone whom I felt right then that I maybe just might love.
    *
    I listened to Hayden’s truck back out of the driveway. He and Juliet were going out to the Lighthouse, with its candles on every table and tri-fold menus. Hayden had rubbed his hands together happilyat the thought of a baked potato wrapped in foil, and Juliet smelled like perfume. Buddy Wilkes’s allure—his slim hips and lank hair, the six-pack too often dangling from his long fingers, the poison of his coyote thinness and dark need—it had been kept away from my sister’s new life. He was just an outsider. For that day anyway.
    Candlelight and dinner, facing each other across a table—this was a setting for love, or else it was supposed to be. Hayden’s hand was on the small of Juliet’s back when they left, and she leaned into him as they went out the front door and down the walk. I would lean into that hand, I would. It would be easy. I would rest against that chest and it would be the rightest feeling in the world because he was a man who understood kindness. You could rest where there were good intentions. If you really cared for someone, though, really cared, you wanted what they wanted for themselves, right? You wanted that for them more than anything else, even if it made your heart clutch up. Even if you wished the hand was there on the small of your own back.
    When they left, I read the new note on the bedside table.
    Dearest Juliet—
    Beautiful places: The tip of the Baja peninsula, Lover’s Beach, a slim stretch of white sand below an arch of rock. The Northern California coastline,