The Six Rules of Maybe

by Deb Caletti

  The Six Rules of Maybe

  ALSO BY DEB CALETTI

  The Queen of Everything

  Honey, Baby, Sweetheart

  Wild Roses

  The Nature of Jade

  The Fortunes of Indigo Skye

  The Secret Life of Prince Charming

  The Six Rules of Maybe

  DEB CALETTI

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events,

  real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places,

  and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance

  to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  SIMON PULSE

  An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division

  1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  First Simon Pulse hardcover edition April 2010

  Copyright © 2010 by Deb Caletti

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  SIMON PULSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact

  Simon & Schuster Special Sales at 1-866-506-1949 or business@simonandschuster.com.

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  Designed by Mike Rosamilia

  The text of this book was set in Scala.

  Manufactured in the United States of America 2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Caletti, Deb.

  The six rules of maybe / by Deb Caletti.—1st Simon Pulse hardcover ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: Scarlet, an introverted high school junior surrounded by outcasts who find her a good listener, learns to break old patterns and reach for hope when her pregnant sister moves home with her new husband, with whom Scarlet feels an instant connection.

  ISBN 978-1-4169-7969-2

  [1. Interpersonal relations—Fiction. 2. Sisters—Fiction. 3. Pregnancy—Fiction.

  4. Mothers and daughters—Fiction. 5. Family life—Oregon—Fiction.

  6. High schools—Fiction. 7. Schools—Fiction. 8. Oregon—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.C127437Six 2010

  [Fic]—dc22

  2009022232

  ISBN 978-1-4169-8545-7 (eBook)

  To Ben Camardi,

  with deepest gratitude for your many years

  of friendship, guidance, and great humor.

  Your belief made it possible.

  Acknowledgments

  My most repeated phrase these days is, “Oh, I’m a lucky woman,” due in good part to the people named here.

  First, huge thanks to my editor and friend, Jen Klonsky, who makes every book better, and my life, too, by being in it. Gratitude to all of the fine people at Simon & Schuster: Paul Crichton, Molly McLeod, Emilia Rhodes, Laura Antonacci, Michelle Fadlalla, Bess Braswell, and the fabulous sales reps who stand behind my work, particularly my dear Leah Hays. Thanks, too, to the other “family” in my and my books’ life—Vulcan Productions and Foundation Features. Michael Caldwell, Richard Hutton, Rob Merilees, Amber Ripley—I’m thankful for the good hands in which you hold my work.

  My family has always been my most solid ground—Evie Caletti, Paul and Jan Caletti, Sue Rath, Mitch, Ty, and Hunter Rath, and Jupiter, too—big thanks, and bigger love to you all. Love and appreciation as well to our great extended gang: Ann Harder, Irma Lazzarini, Joanne Wishart, Dea Belrose, and Carolyn and Lee Harper and family. They will groan at my corniness, but will also know it is true—Sam and Nick, you continue to be the light of my life. God, I’m proud of you guys. You are such good people.

  And, finally, to John Yurich, my husband—you are proof that one should never stop believing in the right and happy ending. With you in my life, I’m permanently and perpetually blessed. Gratitude, gratitude, and more love than this writer could ever have words for.

  The Six Rules of Maybe

  Chapter One

  You could tell something was different about Juliet the moment she stepped out of that truck. She was wearing a yellow summer dress and her hair was pulled back so that you could see her cheekbones and her straight nose and the blazing eyes that used to make all the boys crazy in high school. I don’t know how to explain it, but she seemed smug in some way I’d never seen before. Like she had this satisfying little secret. Like something had been decided by her and her alone. She held her head as if she were the period at the end of her own sentence.

  We knew Juliet was coming home; we just didn’t know she’d be bringing someone else with her, or several someone elses, depending on how you counted. Hayden’s dog, Zeus—he was one of those people-like dogs; he listened hard and looked at you with knowing in his eyes, even if two minutes later he’d decide to zip around the living room, slightly crazed, ears pinned back, taking the corners around the furniture like he was in his own private race with lesser dogs.

  When the truck door slammed outside, Mom looked out the window and gave a little It’s her! squeal and we hurried outside. The afternoon was just right warm—a May day that could have been a role model for all May days, and the air smelled wet and grassy because Mrs. Saint George across the street had turned her sprinkler on. The truck was one of those old kinds with the big wide front that could slam into a tree and still come out smiling its chrome smile. Juliet stepped out and she was all sunbeams in that dress. She was wet grass, and summer, and sunbeams, same as that day was. The thing about sunbeams, though … Well, it might sound unkind. You’ve got to know that I loved my sister very much even if our relationship was complicated (and, anyway, aren’t love and complications basically words partnered forever, like salt and pepper and husband and wife?). But a straight shot of sun directed at a mirror can set things on fire. Juliet and I had learned this ourselves when we were kids one August day on the sidewalk in front of our house. When I was seven (and, honestly, nine and twelve and fourteen), I’d have held that mirror toward the sun for days even if nothing had happened, just because she’d told me to.

  Mom ran across the lawn to hug Juliet like she hadn’t seen her in years even though it had only been five months since she’d been home last, three since Mom and I had gone down to Portland, Oregon, where Juliet had gotten her big break singing four nights a week at the Fireside Room at the Grosvenor Hotel. When you saw her onstage in that sapphire gown, her head tilted back to show her long throat, smoke from some man’s cigarette circling around her like a thin wisp of fog in some old detective movie, you’d never have thought she’d come from tiny Parrish Island. Tiny and inconsequential Parrish Island, where the only important visitors were the pods of Orca whales that came every summer. You’d never have thought Juliet was a regular girl who had graduated from Parrish Island High School only the year before. Barely graduated, I might add, almost flunking Algebra II had it not been for the tutoring of her younger sister, thank you, although Mom would say Juliet had never been a regular girl.

  The driver’s side door opened, and that’s when Hayden got out. I thought he was having a nice stretch before he got back in and went home, a friend doing a friend-favor, maybe. He was about twenty-three or -four, tall, with easy, tousled brown hair. He wore Levi’s with a tucked-in white T-shirt, and his jeans had a big wet spot on the leg, spilled coffee was my guess, which he was blotting with napkins.

  And then he looked up at us.
Or at me, because Mom didn’t even notice him. Usually I was the invisible one in any group, but he was invisible along with me then. Mom was clutching Juliet to her and then holding her away again so that Juliet’s fiery eyes could meet Mom’s blazing ones. So his eyes met only mine, and mine his, and right then my heart shifted, the way it does when something unexpected begins. There are those moments, probably few in a life, where before and after split off from each other forevermore in your mind. That was one of those moments, although I wouldn’t realize it for a long time afterward. I saw something very simple and clear there, in his eyes—that was the thing. Honesty. But with the kind of hope that was just this side of heartbreak.

  He smiled at me, went around to the back of the truck. I guess anyone would have noticed the way he looked in those jeans. Of course I did. In the open pickup bed there was a big dog waiting to be let out. He was the sort of large, energetic dog that made Mom nervous. A sudden dog, and Mom didn’t like sudden things. She mistrusted squirrels and birds and men and anything that had the capacity to surprise. If she ever got a dog, she’d say, it was going to be one of those white and fluffy ones, like Ginger, the Martinellis’ dog, who looked the same as the slippers Mrs. Martinelli wore when she went to get the mail. You could put a dog like that into your purse like a lipstick and take it anywhere you wanted it to go, like women did in New York or Paris. A lipstick with a heartbeat that might pee on your checkbook, in my opinion, but this was Mom’s dream, not mine. I liked a dog you could lean against.

  The dog jumped down and made a galloping leap toward Mom, and the guy in the Levi’s lunged for his collar and said, “Zeus!” in a way that was both emphatic and desperate. Zeus, it would turn out, was actually a very well-trained dog—he’d do anything for Hayden. Zeus would look at Hayden in the complete and adoring way you privately wished and wished and wished that someone, someday, might look at you. But Hayden was a good dog father and knew his boy’s limits—meeting new people turned Zeus into a toddler in the toy aisle, with the kind of joy and want that turned into manic jumping. Zeus leaped up on Mom, who was horrified to be suddenly looking at him eye to eye, and she held him off with a palm to his tan furry chest. She looked down at her clothes as if he might have made her muddy, although the ground was dry and she was only in her old cargo pants and a tank top, her hair in a sort-of bun stuck up with a pair of chopsticks.

  It was then that Mom realized that Juliet had not descended alone from the heavens. She looked surprised at the unexpected visitors and the facts in front of her: this truck, not Juliet’s ancient Fiat convertible; this lanky, excited dog; this lanky, somewhat tousled and tangled guy grabbing his collar …

  And that’s when we saw it. We both did, at the same moment. It caught the sun, so shiny and new was the gold. A wedding band. On the guy’s finger. We both did the same thing next, Mom and me. We looked at Juliet’s left hand. And, yes, there was one there, too. That same gold band.

  My mother put her hand to her chest. I heard her gasp. And then she breathed out those two words, the ones I was feeling right then too, that multipurpose, universal expression of shock and despair.

  “Oh fuck,” my mother said.

  Chapter Two

  Before Juliet came home married to Hayden Renfrew, I had other problems. Clive Weaver, the retired mailman across the street, was losing his mind, and Fiona Saint George who lived next to him (she was a senior at Parrish High, where I was a junior) had fallen into some deep depression, judging by the dark designs she drew in chalk on our sidewalk. Mr. and Mrs. Martinelli, who lived next door to us, were on the cusp of dangerous involvement with scam artists who sent them Urgent Business Propositions by e-mail. And then there was my best friend, Nicole, and her parents’ divorce, which so far involved one breaking-and-entering, one restraining order, various personal items thrown onto the street (a television, too), and an impending trial to decide the custody of two kids almost old enough to vote. Nicole was in a constant state of turmoil, which had meant bouts of sobbing, endless phone conversations, and a brief fling with her parents’ liquor cabinet.

  But my sister’s sudden marriage to someone she’d never before even mentioned—a someone, that someone, who was now heading inside our house carrying a backpack and Juliet’s old purple suitcase—it was a three-car pileup right in our very own driveway.

  Juliet spilled her purse while leaning into the car to retrieve a bunch of daffodils that Hayden had brought for Mom, and we chased an eyeliner and a roll of mints making an escape down the driveway. Finally, we’d gathered everything and went into the house and stood awkwardly in the kitchen. Hayden introduced himself and Mom folded her arms and looked at him as if he’d managed to marry Juliet without her permission. I got a mixing bowl for Zeus and filled it with water and let him into the backyard; he seemed to be embracing this new experience better than anyone else. He sniffed the garbage can and the Weedwacker. He trotted around the willow tree and the rosebushes. He put his paws up on the fence and tried to peer at the Neilsons’ cat through the slats of wood.

  I went back in through the screen door and let it slam shut behind me. I wanted to make some kind of noise, because Juliet had gone off to pee and Hayden just stood there in the kitchen with Mom, his hands clasped in front of him. I felt sorry for him—those clasped hands made it look like he was praying.

  “I really love your daughter, Mrs. Ellis,” he said. “I’m crazy about her, actually.” One thing was becoming very quickly clear: Hayden was not Juliet’s usual type. Not at all. He seemed solid and grounded the way a tree is, and he was kind, you could tell. He had the sort of kindness that announces itself. Already it was obvious he was nothing like Adam Christ or Evan Giordi or, especially, Buddy Wilkes. Buddy Wilkes gave you the shivers. Me, the bad kind of shivers; my sister, the good kind. If Juliet was going to run off and marry anyone, I’d have guessed it would have been him. Buddy Wilkes III was the one my sister had given her heart (and everything else) to on and off for all four years of high school. Who was named Buddy anymore? No one. And he still did all those things guys named Buddy did years ago: smoked cigarettes, worked at a gas station, gave girls a “reputation.” He wasn’t a tree, but a high voltage power line, thin and electric and dangerous.

  “I’m not a ‘Mrs.,’” Mom said. “Unlike my daughter. What did you say your name was?”

  “Hayden,” I offered.

  “Scarlet. Go upstairs. I have more than I can handle here already.”

  I made a can you believe this? face to Hayden to convey that Mom had obviously and suddenly lost her mind. I didn’t want him to think I was someone who could be “sent upstairs,” which was something parents did in TV movies, anyway, not Mom. She was going a little nuts, and he looked stunned and helpless. Juliet appeared again. You could hear the gurgling sound of the toilet tank filling up from the open door of the bathroom. “I know this is a surprise,” she said.

  “Surprise? Surprise? You’re kidding, right? Let me just think a minute, here,” Mom said. She rubbed her forehead with her fingertips as if a plan might appear to undo what had been done. Mom was always a little frazzled on a regular day. I figured it was what happened when the way things were and the way you wished they would be were not quite the same thing.

  “Did you go to Vegas?” I asked. I was suddenly interested in the details, mostly because I was suddenly only realizing there were details. My sister had gotten married. My sister, whom I had grown up next to, who sat beside me in the car and at the dinner table, whom I used to take baths with, who taught me how to use makeup and shared her friends with me like she used to share her white-and-pink animal cookies because she always seemed to have more of everything—she’d gotten married. We both used to hide the zucchini we hated in our napkins and test Mom’s patience and fight about who had what and now she’d joined hands with this particular guy and pledged her long life to his, and maybe she’d worn a white dress or maybe her jeans and maybe there was music or maybe there wasn’t and maybe they’d been i
n a long hall with big windows or barefoot on a beach or gazing into each other’s eyes at a Chapel of Love. How could we not have been there?

  “Portland courthouse,” Juliet said. “Five minutes, and the deal was done.”

  “It was the happiest moment of my life,” Hayden said. “Even if it was all a little … unplanned.” He reached for Juliet’s hand, but she was taking her hair down and putting it back up again. His ring—it sat solid and permanent on his finger. He was the kind of guy who would want love everlasting and silver anniversaries and Thanksgivings at big tables. The things you would want. I would want. Juliet’s ring—it seemed small and light. I could see that. Juliet’s ring had wings.

  “Jesus Christ,” Juliet said, although I doubted He’d come if she called. The two of them didn’t know each other very well. “I can’t believe it but I have to pee again.”

  Mom stopped her forehead rubbing and stood wide-eyed, her face frozen. A freight train might have just come through the living room, its single light 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.