The Six Rules of Maybe

came in a row, all dressed up in powdered sugar.
    “Where is she?” Hayden said. “That’s all I want to know.”
    “Who the fuck are you?” Buddy Wilkes said. He looked honestly surprised. Maybe even a little scared.
    “Her husband .”
    “Her husband?” He squinted. “Look, man, I don’t know who—”
    “Don’t play games with—”
    Hayden stepped toward him. We were right there in the bakery department, where you could get your name put on a birthday cake underneath frosting balloons.
    “Juliet Ellis’s husband?” Buddy’s face cleared in understanding. The threat that made his body tense was gone, and he held his free hand out as a stop sign instead. “Look,” he said. “Keep that chick away from me, understand? I don’t want anything to do with your problems.”
    “What?” Hayden said. He looked a little unsteady. The fightdrained out of him too. It looked possible for him to fall right into that table of cookies in plastic containers.
    “Tell her to stop calling me, okay? It’s not my problem.”
    I didn’t understand, and then I did. I understood when Elizabeth Everly appeared with a container of milk. She looked at all of us with uncertainty, leaned into Buddy, and whispered something to him. He put his arm around her, guided her away from where we stood.
    I took Hayden’s elbow. I knew, as he did, that this was worse somehow, worse than if Juliet had been in that garage apartment with Buddy Wilkes. Buddy Wilkes would have been a simple reason for leaving. Hayden could have brought her back, maybe. He could have forgiven some stupid misguided act with some rival who was in no way his equal. But that she had wanted to break her vows and didn’t and had left anyway—it meant that her reasons were rivers of need too deep and treacherous to cross. You couldn’t see those rivers and still have hope.
    That night, Mom and I were alone for dinner. We had been alone for dinner a lot before Juliet had come home. I had been used to the feeling, Mom and me like an old married couple, the two of us talking about our day and asking the other to pass the butter. But now there was the sort of vast space and stretching time between us that made the clank of the silverware the chosen sound of loneliness. The space was as ragged and confused as the hole in the Saint Georges’ garage, covered in plastic, as ragged and confused as the empty places created in the absence of those you loved, people who had left you that you cared about—Zeus and Hayden, Juliet and Jitter, Fiona Saint George and Kevin Frink, driving and driving and driving God knows where in that Volkswagen. Each time my knife scraped my plate or the tip ofMom’s fork hit hers, I felt like it was possible to go on and on forever feeling alone.
    I felt too many things, and they were crashing against each other until I could not tell which feeling was which. Aching loneliness, despair, worry, but something else pushing to be heard too—something maybe even more honest than the rest.
    “People shouldn’t just go abandoning other people,” I said.
    “That’s true,” Mom said.
    “What about the baby?” I said. “Is she just going to stay away and we’ll never see it?”
    “I don’t think that will happen,” she said.
    “Maybe we should take care of it. She should have the baby and you and me and Hayden will take care of it.”
    Mom stopped moving her food around with the tines of her fork. “I think Juliet’s going to be an excellent mother.”
    I could have spit my milk. The feelings were shuffling and rearranging themselves into some order. “Look what she’s doing now.”
    “She’s scared now. You can be scared and still be a good mother when the time comes.”
    Truth was funny, because it was an insistent thing, maybe as powerful and insistent as some force of nature, the push of water or wind. You could keep it out only so long, but it had its own will and its own needs, and maybe you could keep it at bay with lies, but not for long, not for always.
    Too many things had happened in the last few days, and those things shoved me hard then so that everything I had held up for so long tipped easily, just like that. You don’t realize all that’s been eroded sometimes, all the damage that’s been done, until the moment when the water rushes through and everything is finally and thoroughly destroyed.
    “This is so old,” I said. And it was, it felt a million years old, her watching so carefully over this strong