Page 127 of Here We Go Again
Rosemary doesn’t need to tackle the to-do list right now.
In this moment, on this kitchen floor, all she has to do is feel this excruciating pain.
LOGAN
After two planes, a train from Boston to Portland, a bus ride from Portland to Bangor, and an awkwardly silent hour-long drive in Nurse Addison’s van from Bangor to Bar Harbor, Remy arrives at the cottage by the sea at five in the morning the day after Joe’s death.
Logan and Rosemary are already awake to greet him.
His linen shirt is unwrinkled, and Rosemary cries into his chest when she sees him.
Remy cries too, until he sees the nude painting on the wall, and a smile breaks through the tears. “As it should be.”
The cottage feels strange without Guillermo and Nurse Addison and Joe and all the medical equipment. Logan can’t stand being inside, so the three of them drink coffee with chicory on the patio and watch the sunrise.
“Did he tell you about the cottage?” Remy asks.
“Yes,” Logan says, her eyes fixed on the purples beneath Rosemary’s eyes, the reds of her cheeks from another night of crying. But Logan was there, under the quilt just big enough for two, her arms wrapped around Rosemary. “We’ve decided to stay here. At least for a while.”
Remy takes a long sip of coffee. “I decided it was all worth it,” he tells her. “In the end.” Logan doesn’t understand.
Rosemary blinks away more tears and looks at Remy. “I decided that too.”
The next day, the crunch of gravel beneath tires signals another arrival. It’s her dad, and he’s out of his rental car before it’s shut off, launching himself at Logan and pulling her into a tight hug.
It’s been almost ten weeks since she’s seen him, and she doesn’t realize how much she missed him until his arms wrap around her. She lets herself collapse against him because she doesn’t have to be strong for her dad. She doesn’t have to take care of him. She just gets to be comforted.
“You’re different, Chicken,” Antonio says one evening as he takes a sip of his beer.
Logan kicks her feet up on the railing of the patio. “How so?”
Her dad glances out at the water. Sunset isn’t quite as magnificent as sunrise, but Logan still measures the days by witnessingboth. It’s Wednesday. Her dad has been here for two days, and they managed to give a face lift to the upstairs bathroom in that time. Logan installed the new plumbing. Her dad picked out the new vanity. He accepted this is how she needs to process Joe’s death. By fixing up the place he loved.
“You just seem…settled,” Antonio tries. “Settled in your body. Like your feet are planted here. Less Chicken-like.”
Logan holds her sweaty beer bottle in both hands. “I saw Mom.”
“Yikes. How did that go?”
“Fucking awful. But also… good, in a sense. It was never really about me, was it?”
“No, Chicken. It was always about her.”
The label on her bottle begins to peel, and she picks at it. “I’m thinking about… maybe… staying here?” There is no maybe about it, but she doesn’t know how to tell her dad she’s choosing to leave him like Sophie did. “In Bar Harbor? For… I don’t know. For a bit.”
“I figured,” he says. “You don’t update a bathroom for nothing.”
“That would mean… moving out…”
“Yes, it would.”
She rips off a slice of label, the wet paper sticking to her fingers. “How would you feel about that…?”
“Thank Shay fucking Mitchell,” her dad says, and Logan chokes on an unexpected laugh. “It’s about goddamn time. That’s how I feel about it.”
“But I—” Tears sting her eyes, and she grabs the arm of her chair, forcing herself to stay in this pain. “I always felt like, if I left you, it would… it would be like I’m Mom.”
“Oh, my Chicken.” Her dad gets up from his chair and comes to kneel in front of her. “You are nothing like your mother. And you’ve got to get the hell out of my house.”
