The Six Rules of Maybe

sort of sad, how thrilled dogs were to have their two meals. Then again, I’d had days where there’d been less excitement.
    “Mrs. Martinelli. What you’ve done …” How to get this through to her? “You’ve maybe given away everything. Everything , okay? For nothing . These people have sold their ‘plantation’ countless times, all right? Countless. We’ve got to contact some authorities. You’ve got to get your money back somehow. Get that sign out of the yard… .”
    “You don’t understand. Poor Morin Jude. Her father was murdered on that business trip to France. By his own business partners .” She drew her finger against her neck to demonstrate. Poor MorinJude, all right. Thousands upon thousands of dollars richer.
    I sighed. I rubbed my forehead the way Mom always did when there was nothing else to be done. This was a disaster. “You’re going to get hurt here. Please. I care about you; can’t you hear me?”
    She put on her glasses, read the ingredients of the box, sighed, then put it back down. “Scarlet, should we stay in this house and just move one day closer and another day closer to being dead?”
    I looked into her eyes. I saw that same small, vulnerable person I had seen in Kevin Frink’s. Maybe we all just wanted someone to believe in. That’s all each of us wanted, and it should be so simple, but it never was simple.
    “You gave away things to people who don’t have your best interests at heart, Mrs. Martinelli. We can’t give away things to people like that. Your money—you may never see it again.”
    “You wouldn’t believe what this has done for our sex life,” she said. She snapped her fingers.
    I wanted to clap my hands over my ears. “Oh God.”
    “Oh, don’t be a prude, Scarlet. Birds do it, bees do it, even old ladies do it.” She rolled something in her cheek. “They call this a marshmallow?”
    “Maybe I should talk to Mr. Martinelli,” I said.
    “He’s not here,” she said. “He’s at the consulate picking up our passports. Then he’s dropping off the Buick at Bill Rogers’s house. He paid more than what it was worth. The minute this house sells, we’re outta here.”
    I had to get on the phone. There must be something that could be done. It was wrong; that was all. People just couldn’t be taken advantage of like that.
    “Swiss Miss,” Mrs. Martinelli scoffed.
    “I don’t know what to say,” Mom said. Shoes were strewn all over the rug in my mother’s room, and blouses were tossed onto the bed in small mountains of rejection. I had those moments, too, when nothing, nothing looked right or felt right. “I think you have to let other people have their own disasters.”
    “Juliet talked to you,” I said. Her words weren’t just about the Martinellis; that was obvious.
    “You can’t fix it all, Scarlet. A person can’t hold that much in their own hands. I wish you could.”
    “Why can’t a person? I’m sorry; I don’t get that.”
    “Why?” She looked at herself in the long mirror on the back of her door. “It’s just, you’ve got to …” She turned back to me. “I don’t know, the idea that we can control things is wishful thinking. Sometimes, there’s nothing that can be done. You can let go; that’s all. Maybe that’s the most important thing to do.”
    “That’s chicken shit,” I said. “When something bad is happening, you don’t just give up and let it happen! We know that. We’re taught that. Can you imagine a movie where there’s this big war between good and evil and the fighters of good just say, ‘Oh well, there’s nothing that can be done.’ Film over.”
    She gave her outfit a dissatisfied glance in the mirror, turned, and looked at me dead-on. “A different film would start. Maybe a more real one. Bad guys do win. Things aren’t fair. There isn’t always some great big terrific something that happens to make everything turn out right.”
    “I know that,” I said. It came out sounding sarcastic and childish. Maybe I didn’t really know that or, at least, completely believe it.
    “Sweetie,” Mom said. She sighed. She sat down on the edge of her bed. I looked at her in her confused clothes. She seemed verytired. She had only one shoe on. “We don’t always get what we want.”
    This scared me. The one shoe, the sighing, the discarded clothes—it looked like defeat. But what scared me even more was the change in her message—the message we’d heard from the time we were small. You can