The Six Rules of Maybe

him somewhere, wherever he was now. I thought of Juliet, and Jitter. If letting go, if letting people and things work themselves out in the way that they needed to without your help was the most important thing, then it was also the hardest.
    “I need to let her grow up,” Mom said.
    Juliet was set to leave the next morning. I figured it was time, as good a time as any, for the end of the Make Hope and Possibilities Happen for Clive Weaver project.
    I waited until it was dark. I gathered all of my supplies in a big garbage bag and went out the front door. I laid the bag on the sidewalk, let the treasures pour out.
    I stuffed the mailbox first. I crammed so many letters in there, he’d have trouble getting them all out. I left the mailbox door open, let the letters pile up on the door itself, and then gather on the ground underneath in an enormous mound.
    And then I went to his big tree. I tied crane upon crane—blue and yellow and pink and white, cranes made out of Yvonne Yolanda’s real estate flyers and clothing catalog, cranes made outof tire ads and mattress sales and coupons for extra-larges with everything. A dog barked and the Pete-Robbins’s light went on. I imagined Ally Pete-Robbins peeking at me through the slats in her blinds. But I didn’t care. I just filled that tree so that when he woke up, it would look like every good thing possible had happened.
    I thought the cry I heard the next morning was one of pain, the sound of a heart ripping from a body, a howl of deep despair. Sobs, after that. The cries came from the front yard. I didn’t even have time to open my eyes and look before Mom yelled from downstairs. “Scarlet? Scarlet, come down! What did you do?”
    My heart stopped. No, please, please, no. I imagined the worst, some disaster again, some terrible thing happening because I had wanted to do something good. I ran downstairs without looking out my window. Oh God, what now? Didn’t I ever learn? I heard Mom’s and Juliet’s excited voices. He was dead maybe. The shock had given him a heart attack and he was naked and dead on his lawn.
    But when I got downstairs I saw Juliet at the front window in her robe and her sleepy face, and I saw Mom standing in the open front door. I heard the sound again, but the noise wasn’t what I thought.
    “Look,” she said.
    Mom pointed to what I already knew was there—the tree, full and bright and glorious in the morning light, shimmery with color and surprise, the mail pile as big as an enormous snowfall—and to what I didn’t know was there, Clive Weaver, bent in half, laughing. Laughing so, so hard. He stood straight, looked over at us, his hand in the air to indicate he couldn’t take the slightest bit more humor just yet. His feet were bare in the wet grass, and Corky ran back and forth in high-strung uncertainty.
    I put my hand to my mouth. “Surprise, Clive Weaver!” Ishouted. “Surprise for you!” My heart felt so big and wide. You could give and give until it hurt you, give without boundaries or self-protection or reciprocation, give out of fear, and it could leave you empty and depleted and even used. But you could also give out of something very simple—a pure desire—to be kind, and it could double and triple your own joy.
    “It’s Christmas, Scarlet,” he said. “It’s goddamn Christmas!”
    And that was the best possible outcome, I thought. Because if it was Christmas when you didn’t expect it, it was possible, just maybe possible, that it might be Christmas any day at all.

Chapter Twenty-eight
    W e would take Juliet to the ferry; that was the plan. She would get on, and Hayden would meet her on the other side. The reunion would be their business, and so would the car ride to Portland and their eventual settling into married student housing at the university. All of the letters he would write her from then on would be their business too. We hugged for a long time before Juliet walked onto the ferry. The four of us. Mom and me and Juliet and Jitter.
    We watched her back disappear through the terminal doors.
    “Well,” Mom said. That’s what a person said, after all, when there was a big wide range of possibilities in their view, none of which they could truly do much about.
    “Well,” I said.
    Joe and Jim Nevins lifted the thick ropes from the dock pilings, and the huge white ferry eased away. Cars of tourists were already lined up for the next sailing out. That’s how it was in the summeron Parrish Island.