The Six Rules of Maybe

barreling straight toward her.
    “No,” she said.
    “What?” I asked.
    “No,” she said again.
    Hayden looked desperate. He was pacing while he was standing still; that’s what he was doing.
    “What?” I said again.
    “Scarlet, I told you to go upstairs!” Mom shrieked.
    I didn’t have much choice, then, and as I left the room, I felt the shame and embarrassment of having a mother, which followed me the entire way up the stairs. Banishing me wouldn’t do much good anyway. I was someone who liked to stay toward the background, and when you’re that kind of person you have a way of finding things out no matter where you are. Sometimes, you don’t even have to try—information seeks you out and clings, same as the smell of cigarette smoke to clothes. I knew from a very young age, for example, that our father, Steven Ellis, moved to Vancouver Island around the time I was three, even though I had no memory of it or of him, and even though our mother never spoke of it. Fatherhood was too much for him, from what I understood, the way rich foods are too much for some people’s stomachs.
    I knew various facts about other things too. My mother’s subsequent boyfriends: Vic was a cheapskate and Tony’s ex wife took everything he had and Mark thought he was so hot but he couldn’t figure out how much to tip a waiter without counting on his fingers. I also knew that my sister lost her virginity with Buddy Wilkes on her fifteenth birthday, in his parents’ rec room, under a mounted deer head that Buddy and his father killed on a hunting trip. The day after Juliet’s fifteenth birthday, she became a vegetarian for one year; until then, that was the longest she’d been dedicated to anything. And somehow she’d also become just as dedicated to Buddy, as attached as that deer head was to the faux pine paneling of the rec room wall.
    From my place upstairs, then, I did something I was very good at. I watched and I listened. From the landing I could see Mom’s feet—painted toenails, brown sandals—which were facing Hayden’s—a pair of guy’s feet in sturdy well-worn Birkenstocks.Can toes look angry? Because Mom’s did. It was a foot face-off. I wished I had my camera with me, because it would have been a good shot. Feet versus feet, the moment in the animal shows just before one creature gets ripped to shreds.
    “I know this is a shock,” Hayden said. These were the words being used— shock, surprise —words of sudden ambush. “It’s a surprise to me, too,” Hayden said.
    “You must have realized there was this possibili —”
    “Can we go outside or something? The heat is killing me.” Juliet’s feet joined theirs. White sandals with fragile, thin straps and the narrowest of heels. That summer, I would come to understand something about fragility—how powerful it was, how other people’s need could draw you in, bully and force sure as an arm twisted behind your back. But right then I saw only shoes, no big metaphor, two sets of reliable, dedicated feet following those delicate heels outside.
    The feet exited stage left. I heard the screen door open, and Hayden called out something to Zeus. Ice cubes were freed from a tray, clinked into glasses. The screen door shut again. Everyone was likely sitting at the umbrella table outside, which meant I’d have a good enough view from the bathroom. I crossed the hall, lifted myself up onto the countertop. The bathroom was still all new starts and shiny surfaces, smelling the blue-brightness of Windex, cleaned only an hour ago by me. Since Juliet had left home, her returns had reached the status of Company Coming, meaning the bathrooms were cleaned for her and Mom had made a dessert, and Mom never made dessert.
    “It’s just Juliet,” I had said as Mom spread the pink peppermint-chip ice cream into a chocolate-cookie pie shell, swirling it with the edge of her spatula.
    “Juliet’s doing big things in the world,” Mom had said. Mom respected “big things in the world.” Ever since we were kids, we’d hear her talk about Following Your Dreams and Aiming High and Seeing the World as she packed our lunch or drove us home from swimming lessons or carried our tri-fold boards into the cafeteria where the science fair was being held. She’d sing her favorite song “Be” by her favorite singer Neil Diamond as she pasted photographs of places she’d never been into the scrapbooks she made with the scrapbook club Allison, her best friend,