The Six Rules of Maybe

and practically shoved her against the door marked LIFE PRESERVERS . He thrust his face onto hers and moved his hands to her hair and kissed her so hard and long that the lady with the coffee stopped her cup just shy of her mouth.
    Juliet made a small sound behind me. Buddy let Elizabeth Everly go. Her hair was stuck up in a funny way and her cheeks were red, but she looked beautiful. They’d obviously had practice at that. But maybe what was more shocking than the kiss itself was the way Buddy looked afterward, the way he stared into her eyes as softly as the kiss was hard. The thing was, Buddy Wilkes was in love with her. Really in love . You could see it. It was so plainly there, plain as Elizabeth’s own hands reaching for a book to shelve at the Parrish Island Library.
    They started walking forward again, and the woman went back to her crossword puzzle, and the old man dropped his coins into the snack machine slot, and the couple went back to ignoring each other. You could smell Elizabeth Everly’s perfume as she walked past, light and clean, fresh enough to drown out the smell of cigarettes on Buddy’s clothes. He was walking right past us, right past, maybe two feet from Juliet at the most.
    “Buddy!” Juliet said. It sounded fake-light, fake-casual, the appropriate start to fake small talk, the kind that’s actually heavy with history and meaning— How’ve you been, fine, great to see you again —but that didn’t happen. If he even heard his name, he gave no indication. Buddy just walked right past, not even looking our way. Not even looking Juliet’s way. He didn’t even notice her. His name just hung there in the air until you weren’t even sure Juliet had ever spoken it.
    When we arrived home, Ally Pete-Robbins was heading up her driveway carrying one of the Martinellis’ former Bundt pans, and that motorcyclist I’d seen on the street before was thumbing through their record albums and reading the back of one called Boots: Nancy Sinatra . Mr. Martinelli was snapping his fingers and dancing a littleto some nonexistent music. Mrs. Martinelli was giving the hard sell to two middle-age women holding a pair of Christmas sweaters and a Joni Mitchell album.
    Inside our own house, on the kitchen counter, was the Martinellis’ old VCR and collection of videos in a box marked $2.00 . Mom was always several entertainment devices behind the times. She was proud that her car had a tape player.
    “Well?” Mom shouted down the stairs. You could tell she was having material-object thrill—a new VCR and a crib we must have bought, but Juliet was heading downstairs with her mood, not wanting to talk to anyone. Hayden followed her. I felt sorry for him, and for Mom, too. I felt sorry for everyone who’d ever been hurt by self-involved people.
    Mom thumped down the stairs happily. She stopped when she saw me. Zeus sat down nearby, as if he was sticking with us.
    “We saw Buddy on the ferry,” I said.
    Mom said nothing.
    “With someone. Really with someone.”
    She sighed. “I don’t get it,” she said. “I don’t get him. I never did.”
    I was wrong about Hayden following Juliet downstairs, because suddenly he was there too. “She says he makes her feel safe,” he said.
    We both looked over at him. I was sorry he’d heard us. His face was grim. “He makes her feel safe because he’s badder than anything bad.”
    That night, I heard the doorknob handle turn. I wondered if I might hear the engine of Hayden’s truck start up and leave forever, if I might hear it that night or another night. Instead, I only heard the frustrated, unsuccessful flicking of that lighter again.
    That night, we didn’t speak. I just tossed him the pack of matches and he caught them against his chest, as the pink light of morning showed over the horizon.

Chapter Eighteen
    T he note had three lines.
    Steadiness and permanence, Juliet.
    Those are the strongest words I know.
    I will not leave you like you’ve been left before.
    This, Hayden had wrong, I was sure. Who had ever left Juliet? No one left Juliet.
    The next morning, I caught Hayden just standing and staring at Jitter’s black-and-white image stuck to the front of our refrigerator.
    “Still trying to figure out if it’s a boy or girl?” I said.
    I’d startled him. He jumped. When I saw his face, it looked unbearably sad.
    “Scarlet … ,” he said. He held my eyes. He seemed to want totell me something. I waited. He would speak, and I would be there