Page 12 of Here We Go Again
“Always the star pupil,” Joe says, tenderly putting a hand on hers. “Ten gold stars, Rosie, darling.”
Logan glares up at her from the other side of the bed. “Oh, so you’re an oncologist now?”
She presses her tongue to the roof of her mouth before she can say anything unkind. She wishes she’d been the one to get here first, that she’d had time to talk privately with Joe about his fall and his broken foot, about how he isreallydoing, about these supposed mets. But she had to call her insurance company to report the accident; she had to call Mickey’s Mechanic to set up an appointment; she had to race back to her condo to change her coffee-stained clothes.
Logan is sitting there still covered in now-crusty pink liquid.
“Where are the mets?” Rosemary asks, focusing all her attention on Joe.
He sighs. “They’re everywhere, girls. In my bones. I’m too weak for more chemo, and apparently, you can’t survive with cancer in every damn part of your body.”
“I mean, not with that attitude,” Logan says.
Joe laughs. Overhead, the fluorescent lights flicker and hum, and Rosemary presses her cool fingertips to both temples like that will somehow help her incipient anxiety migraine. Logan always gets to be the fun one. She’s the one who brings Joe Tillamook cheeseburgers from Burgerville when he’s in the hospital, even though he’s not supposed to eat them since his Whipple procedure. Logan gets to be the one who watches Netflix with him, the one who impulsively buys him a dog, the one who sneaks him out of rehab for milkshakes.
Rosemary is the one who drives him to all of his appointments; the one who picks up all his prescriptions; the one who helped him sell his house; the one who moved him into assisted living.
Nearly everyone in Vista Summit between the ages of twenty-two and fifty-two has Joe to thank for their understanding of the semicolon and their appreciation for the themes inFrankenstein,and when he first got diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, the town banded together to support him. Bake sales to raise money for his medical procedures and meal-trains and an Excel spreadsheet with volunteer time slots, so Joe was never alone when he was in the hospital. Rosemary had just moved back home, and she baked brownies and cooked lasagna and sat beside him every Tuesday from five to eight, reading the new Isabel Allende aloud to him.
But the community support began to taper off during his second round of chemo. Soon, there were no casseroles, and no baked goods to help with the medical bills; the chair next to his bed was often empty. The people of Vista Summit had been happy to rally around Joe when it seemed like a cure was imminent, but the longer his battle went on, the less anyone seemed to care. Except for Rosemary.
Except for, inexplicably, Logan Maletis.
Metastases in his bones. She swallows around the anxiety lump in her throat and tries to focus. “What’s the treatment plan?”
“There is no treatment plan,” Joe answers with unnerving calm. “My oncologist says I’ve got three months, at best. I’m just hoping to make it through one last summer.”
“No treatment plan?” Rosemary echoes, staring at the wrinkled face of the man who cultivated her love of literature and nurtured her writing; the man who cared about her at a time in her life when no one else did. How can she possibly be calm about this? “That’s unacceptable. Logan, tell him that’s unacceptable.”
Logan fiddles with the clasp on her overalls. “It’s his life.” She shrugs.
“Like hell it is.” Her brain swirls around solutions and miracle cures and next steps. Could they get more Herceptin with his current insurance? Could she find another clinical trial?
“Girls,” he says again, like they are still an indistinguishable pair, inseparable even though they’ve been separated for so long. Like they’re still the fourteen-years-olds who walked into his classroomtwo decades ago. “You know I adore you both, and I appreciate your stubbornness, Rosie, but my death ismine. I get to set the terms, and I don’t want to die fighting. I want to die as high as a kite—so fucking high, I can’t even spell mets.”
Rosemary presses her tongue to the roof of her mouth. “Cancer isn’t funny.”
“Out of the three of us, I’m the only one dying from it, so it’s funny if I say it’s funny. What did I teach you in AP Lit?”
“You can’t combine two independent clauses with a comma?” Logan guesses.
“That comedy and tragedy are arbitrary genre distinctions,” Rosemary answers, like she’s back in the front row of his classroom, raising her hand at every question. And Logan makes a barfing noise like she’s still stuck in the backroom of his classroom, mocking everything Rosemary did. Logan Maletis always makes her feel fourteen again in the worst kind of way.
“That’s right. The only difference between a Shakespearean comedy and a Shakespearean tragedy,” he continues in his resonant lecture voice, “is that one ends with marriage and the other ends with death.”
“That’s somewhat of an oversimplification of Frye’s genre classifications—”
“We’re not in a Shakespearean play,” Logan cuts in.
“Aren’t we?” Joe asks with a tilt of his head.
“I didn’t hit her with my car on purpose!” Logan flails. “I amnotthe Iago!”
Rosemary tunes her out. Cancer in his bones. No treatment plan.One last summer. She feels nauseous, but that’s how she always feels at Evergreen Pines. The whole place smells like bleach and wet towels, and the lights wash everything out in a sallow, sickly glow, and Joe always looks so pitiful, tucked under cheap blankets in a khaki-colored room.
He’s dying. She crouches down beside him and clasps one leathery hand between both of hers. “I’m so sorry, Joe.”
Logan shakes her head in denial. “If you’re dying for realsies, where in the name of Phoebe Bridgers is your family?” she asks, like she hasn’t been paying attention at all the past four years.
