The Six Rules of Maybe

some reason, she was being very motherly with me right then, probably because she wished she could do it with Juliet, but it was too late. She was never really much like that—even her lectures were more strong suggestions, darts thrown with best effort, with no expectation of actually hitting the bull’s eye. Honestly, how much could she actually care about my social life right at that minute? It felt a little like a mother performance. Displaying her authority to Hayden, the way teachers did on the first day of class to set the general tone.
    “I used to love Friday night,” Juliet said.
    “Scarlet, you have to make things happen for yourself. You can’t just wait around for the doorbell to ring,” Mom said, which, by the way, was exactly how she had met Dean Neuhaus. His Lexus had broken down on our street and his cell phone battery was used up, so he had asked to use our phone.
    I rolled my eyes in Hayden’s direction, to let him know thatpublic humiliation had no effect on me, and then used the favorite line of social losers: “I’ve got a ton of homework anyway,” I said.
    “Well, it’s your decision,” my mother said with that uphill warning-rise in her voice. A person who says It’s your decision is informing you that your decision sucks, but I pretended not to know this. Instead, I smiled and changed the subject back to where it belonged. Someone needed to.
    “When’s the baby due?”
    “October tenth,” Juliet said.
    “She’s four and a half months along.” My mother’s fork tinked against the plate in a way that seemed either angry or heartbroken. It was a long time to keep a secret. Juliet probably even had known last time we’d come to visit. I wondered what it would be like to keep that big a secret for so long. That could change you, maybe. The press of it day in and day out. Pretending everything was the same when we all sat in her hotel room and ate room-service meals. But Juliet looked just the same as she always did, except for maybe a small mound under her sundress if you looked closely. She was plucking off a crunchy corner of Hayden’s lasagna with her fork. I hated when she did that. You never wanted to sit by her at dinner because her fork would come visiting your plate uninvited.
    “You thought of names?” I asked.
    “Scarlet,” Mom said. Maybe she thought if we ignored this, it would go away. But I didn’t think that baby was going to stay inside Juliet forever.
    “We haven’t talked about that yet,” Juliet said. You got the feeling they hadn’t talked about most things. “Hayden calls it Jitter, as in Jitterbug.”
    I felt his embarrassment before I saw it, saw his neck flushing red. We didn’t know who he was or where he even came from, andthis small bit of information seemed too suddenly personal. Maybe you should hear that someone is softhearted only after you at least know if they came from Saint Louis or Michigan. There’s an order to those things.
    He braved our eyes, looked up. “It seemed wrong … you know. To keep calling it it .”
    Juliet didn’t seem to notice his embarrassment. In fact, she didn’t seem to notice him much at all. When she looked at him, it was with the flat and uncommitted gaze one gives to boring television.
    “Jitterbug … ,” my mother said slowly, as if this were taking a long time to reach the understanding part of her brain.
    “It was just one of those things that comes into your head… .” Hayden said.
    “I like it,” I said. “It’s very friendly.”
    “Scarlet’s the generous one too,” Juliet said.
    “Last time I heard, that was a good thing,” Hayden said.
    Right then, one of the neighborhood dogs barked, Corky maybe or Ginger, and Zeus leaped to his feet and barked a loud and strong reply. He was doing his job, as far as I saw it. They communicated, and you communicated back, or you were rude. But Mom put her hand to her heart as if she’d just heard a cannon explode.
    “Oh my God,” she said. “Jesus.”
    If you judged by the mess we were all in then, it didn’t much look like He came when she called, either.
    After dinner, Mom cut the pie and brought it into the backyard and she and Juliet had some hushed conversation that involved living arrangements and Juliet’s room versus the basement, while Hayden threw a tennis ball over and over for Zeus. There was the sort of tension that made you feel like someone had left the gas on in anenclosed room, even though we were outside.
    My head