Page 13 of Here We Go Again
“Dead, mostly,” Joe answers. “It’s just my brother and his family outside Houston.”
Logan scoffs. “And why isn’t your brother here?”
Joe chuckles. “I’m so happy you girls grew up in a generation where the answer to that question isn’t obvious.”
“Ah. Homophobe?”
Joe nods. “Homophobe.”
Logan makes a clucking sound and turns her head toward the window where Joe has a magnificent view of the parking lot, and Rosemary breaks her rule, just for one minute. She studies Logan’s face in profile, trying to get some sense of the emotions behind that neutral mask.
She’d been so expressive when they were young: round cheeks that scrunched up to her eyes when she smiled; gawky limbs that moved like wet noodles when she spoke excitedly; a big beak-like nose that started too high on her face, giant teeth, and bushy eyebrows. Eleven years old, with a dead dad, in a new town, completely petrified. But then she saw Logan standing at the bus stop with her baggy shorts, a chaotic bird’s nest of dark brown hair on her head. Rosemary couldn’t look away.
Now, Logan’s face is mostly sharp angles and symmetrical features used for smirking or flirting. Somewhere over the course of the last two decades, she learned how to carry her limbs, but she never got braces, so she still has a terrible overbite from childhood. Her two front teeth stick out, so her upper lip can never fully close around them, making her perpetually on the verge of saying something. Or kissing someone.
This version of Logan is beautiful, and Logan absolutely knows it. Everyone who’s ever met her knows it. That’s why women fall at her feet, even though they all know she’s going to trample them beneath her ugly shoes.
But Rosemary preferred Logan better when her awkward features telegraphed every emotion. Because here they are. Joe is dying, and Logan looks like it’s just a scratch on her car; like she’s going to tell Joe to just buff it out.
“I’ve mostly made my peace with dying, my family be damned,” Joe says into the quiet of the room. Logan tears her gaze away from the window, and Rosemary tears her gaze away from Logan.
“What do you need from us, Joe?” Logan asks with a tone as unmoved as her expression. “Why did you ask us both to come?”
Rosemary reaches out for Joe’s hand. “Yes, tell us what you need,” she adds. “What can we do for you?”
Joe exhales. “Well. You could drive me to Maine.”
“Like, Main Street?”
“Like, Maine the state.”
Logan erupts in wild laughter. When Joe doesn’t crack a smile, her expression sobers again. “Wait. Are you serious right now?”
“I have a cottage in Maine, on the water outside Bar Harbor,” he says. This is news to Rosemary, and based on the flicker of feeling in Logan’s face, it’s news to her, too. “I want to return there. I want to see that old cottage by the sea and the Atlantic Ocean. That’s my dying wish.”
“Your dying wish?” Logan snorts. “You’re trulysucha theatrical queen.”
He makes a flourishing gesture, like he is flipping an invisible scarf over his shoulder, and the past slams into her again. Rosemary is back there, on the first day of high school. Feeling so small, so afraid, so terribly alone since she’d lost her best friend that summer. She walked into her first-period English class, and she immediately felt at ease.
Joe was in his midforties then, noticeably handsome, with grays speckling his thick, black hair. His dark eyes crinkled in the corners as he smiled and somehow greeted each student by name, even though it was the first day of school. She would learn later that he always memorized his rosters in August, a habit she would adopt, too.
He wore a navy sweater with patches on the elbows and a bright silk scarf, which he tossed theatrically over one shoulder when the bell rang. “Good morning, my children,” he’d greeted almost musically. “Welcome to high school.”
And he’d meant it. He treated each student like they werehis. When he found out Rosemary usually spent her lunch period crying in the bathroom, he invited her to eat in his classroom instead. And when he found out she liked to write little stories, he encouraged her to keep at it. And when he began to suspect she was like him, he didn’t push it or say a damn word about it until she was ready to come out to him senior year.
At Yale, she still sent him every creative writing assignment, every A paper, every short story she managed to get published online, because Joseph Delgado never stopped caring about his children.
“I’m not joking,” Joe says now. “I don’t want to die in some sterile hospice facility. I want to die in that cottage. I want to die in Maine, near the ocean.”
She can hear in his voice how serious he is—it’s the voice he used when lecturing about Romantic-era poetry or the Harlem Renaissance or active verbs. “Okay,” she says, squeezing his hand as tight as she can. “I can fly to Maine with you.”
He shakes his head. “No, no. I want to drive. I’d like to see a little more of this country before I go.”
Logan visibly balks. “I’m not sure you’d survive a cross-country road trip, old man. You broke your foot trying to go to the bathroom.”
“No one said anything about surviving, asshole.” Joe takes a slow breath. “Look. I’m fully aware that I might die on the road between here and Maine, but it would be worth it for the chance to see that place one more time.”
“I can show you the ocean right now. On Google Images.” Logan pulls out her phone. “You don’t need to suffer in a car.”
