Page 14 of Here We Go Again
“Think about what you’re asking,” Rosemary says. “I-I don’t think I could drive you to your death, Joe.”
He shakes his head. “Then don’t think about it that way. Think of it as just a fun vacation.” He attempts a smile, but it quickly dissolves into a cough. He grips his old handkerchief, the hand-embroidered one with the initials RSP in the corner. She’s always been too polite to ask, but she wonders whose possession Joe has always clung to so desperately.
“Where is your sense of spontaneity and adventure, girls?” he manages when the coughing is under control.
Rosemary watches the way that question works its way across Logan’s features, solidifying into a stubborn expression Rosemary knows so well. Logan was always the adventurous one—the one who pushed them to go higher, faster, past every boundary. The one who dared Rosemary to swipe a Butterfinger from the Quick-E-Mart, the one who made them jump from the tallest rock into Tarren Lake, the one who used to dream about their future together when they finally escaped this horrible town. The Logan Maletis she’d known in middle school was an immovable force, all kinetic potential and unchecked yearning and sparkling wit.
When Rosemary moved back to Vista Summit four years ago, she wondered how that version of Logan could ever lead tothisversion: thirty-two years old and still stuck in this small town that had been too cramped for her even at eleven.
“Let’s say I did agree to drive you…,” Logan begins, swiping at her top lip with her tongue as she thinks. “How would that even work?”
“I have faith the two of you could figure out how to transport a dying man across the country.”
“The two of us?” For the first time since she arrived at Evergreen Pines, Logan looks directly at Rosemary. Her hazel eyes still burn with the passion of her eleven-year-old self.
“I want you both to drive me,” Joe clarifies. “We’ll drive to Maine, all three of us. That’s why I asked you here.”
Now Rosemary is the one who laughs. “The two of us? In a car? Forthree thousand miles?”
Joe’s chapped lips curl into another smile. “Sounds like a dream.”
“You know we literally got in an accident today? She smashed my car.”
“Our cars were smashed together,” Logan clarifies. “There’s been no admission of fault.”
“Car accident aside,” he says diplomatically, “I wouldn’t trust anyone else to drive me across the country.”
“Then you’d better settle for Delta Airlines’ basic economy,” Logan tells him, but Rosemary’s brain is stuck on Joe’s question. When was the last time she truly did something spontaneous? She thinks about that sweltering day in August their last summer together, when Logan convinced her to strip down to her underwear and swim in Tarren Lake, just the two of them. They’d been hiking all day in the heat, passing a single water bottle between them, their fingers brushing every time, their mouths occupying the same small piece of plastic. The cool water felt like sin against her bare skin.
She could drive Joe to Maine. Even as her anxiety branches out like a spider’s web of what-ifs, her brain cobbles together a makeshift itinerary. She suddenly has ten weeks off, an entire summer spread out before her. She could do this.
“Please, girls,” Joe begs. “Don’t let me die in this beige room.”
Rosemary knows in the pit of her stomach she won’t. She glances over at Logan, whose face is still impassive. “Please, Logan. Bury those hatchets,” Joe says quietly, like it’s only the two of them in this moment, and Rosemary is intruding on something deeply private. “Do it for me. Because you care about me.”
Logan reaches for her sunglasses, even though it’s still raining outside. The reflective tint of her aviators hides her expression entirely as she says, “Haven’t you heard, Joe? I’m an apathetic asshole who doesn’t care about anyone.”
Chapter Five
ROSEMARY
“Have you ever changed an adult diaper before?”
“Good morning to you, too,” her mother grumbles as she lets herself into Rosemary’s apartment. She’s wearing her Scooby Doo scrubs, and she has a spare key in one hand, a coffee carrier in the other, and a bag of bagels clenched between her teeth.
“What am I talking about?” Rosemary says, mostly to herself. “You’re a nurse. Of course you know how to change an adult diaper. Can you teach me?”
Andrea Hale drops everything onto the midcentury modern coffee table in front of her daughter with an unceremoniousthunk. “Last week it was learning Portuguese on Duolingo, and this week it’s geriatric incontinence. Kids these days…”
Rosemary snatches her Americano from the drink carrier and goes back to her bullet journal where she’s taking notes on how to convert a vehicle so it’s wheelchair accessible. Her hand is starting to ache from gripping the pen too tightly, but she ignores it. “I’m doing research.”
“I’m only fifty-six. And sure, sometimes when I sneeze, a little pee comes out, but that’s what happens when you have a baby. I’mstill a few years from diap—” Her mother cuts off as she seems to notice the supplies spread out across the living room. The wireless printer, the label maker, the laminator, the three-hole punch, the open binder full of color-coded tabs. “Is that a laminated map of I-80?”
“It is,” she answers without looking up.
“What, exactly, are you researching?”
“How to transport a dying man from Washington to Maine.”
