Page 15 of Here We Go Again
“Okay, let’s set down the washi tape for a minute.” Andrea has to pry the bullet journal from Rosemary’s clawlike fingers. “Why would you need to medically transport someone to Maine?”
Rosemary closes her eyes and sees Joe’s desperate expression under those ghoulish fluorescents.Please, Rosemary. You have to convince her, he said after Logan so cavalierly walked away.
It’s my dying wish.
The grief and loss and fear creep up her throat just thinking about it, but she washes those feelings down with a gulp of scalding-hot Americano. Right now, she has to focus on what she can control, and that’s this. Her research. Her binder and her itinerary.
She finally looks up and sees the familiar concern in her mother’s face. “Joe is dying,” she explains. “The doctors give him three months, and he wants me to drive him to Bar Harbor, Maine, before he dies.”
“And you’re actually considering doing it?” Her mom glances around the room again, and Rosemary sees her living room through her mother’s eyes: the detritus of another hyperfixation. “Did you stay up all night working on this?” her mom asks carefully.
It’s only then that she notices the sting of exhaustion in the back of her eyes. “Mom, it’s Joe.” Her voice cracks over his name.
Her mom slowly lowers herself into the wingback chair across from her daughter. “I know Joe is important to you, but this is a lot to ask of a former student….”
“Joe isn’t just my former teacher. He’s—” She bites down.
He was there for me when you couldn’t be. The thought cuts through her exhaustion.
She knows Andrea did the best she could with what she had, and growing up, they didn’t have much. Years of therapy helped Rosemary accept this.
Andrea Hale believed love was moving her eleven-year-old daughter across the country where nothing would ever remind her of the dad she lost; love was never talking about loss at all; love was working double shifts at the hospital so she could put food on the table, clothes on Rosemary’s back, money in her college fund. Andrea wasn’t around for family dinners, or movie nights on the couch, or heart-to-hearts; she didn’t take Rosemary shopping for homecoming dresses or ask her about her day or hug her more than a few times a year.
So, most days, instead of going home to an empty house after school, Rosemary went to Mr. Delgado’s classroom. When she struggled with her anxiety, when she struggled to manage her stress, when she began questioning her sexuality, her mom wasn’t the adult she turned to for emotional support.
Until her life in New York fell apart and she came running back home. Now, she and her mom have Saturday morning bagels and Thursday dinners and the occasional impromptu check-in on her mental health. She appreciates these small gestures, but none of them can change the fact that they’re two women with the same pale eyes and pale hair who don’t really understand each other. Her mother was never going togetthe way Rosemary’s brain worked. And while she didn’t bat an eye at the idea that Rosemary liked women, Andrea can’t fathom why Rosemary doesn’t everdatewomen. Why she seems to have no interest in dating or intimacy or (heaven forbid) sex.
In Andrea’s defense, Rosemary doesn’t really know why she has no interest in those things, either.
“Honey,” Andrea starts in her best trying-to-be-a-mother tone. “I’m not sure this is the healthiest thing for you right now.”
“I’m totally healthy.”
Her mother clicks her tongue, trying to censor herself. A family trait. “But what about… don’t you have summer school?”
Rosemary glances down at the calluses and ink stains on her fingers. “I-I got laid off, actually.”
“What?” Her mother is out of the wingback chair and beside Rosemary on the couch before she can blink. “Oh, honey. No. I know what that job means to you.”
The burn of tears joins the exhaustion in her eyes. She takes another swig of her Americano. “So, the timing is perfect, really. I have the summer off, which means I can do this for Joe.”
Another tongue click.
“It’s his dying wish, Mom.”
Andrea sighs, and then puts a hand on Rosemary’s shoulder. It looks awkwardly out of place there. “Is this about your fath—?”
“This isn’t about Malcolm,” she snaps. “This is about Joe. About honoring Joe, who gave his whole life to the young people in this ungrateful town and never got the thanks he deserved.”
She feels her mom’s fingers briefly tense, then relax, through the wool layer of her cowl-neck house sweater. “Okay. You feel this is something you need to do. I can respect that. But, honey, you can’t drive Mr. Delgado three thousand miles by yourself.”
Rosemary stares at her binder, at the plan that’s beginning to take shape. “No. I won’t be doing it by myself.”
LOGAN
She wakes up to Shania Twain.
In some households, nine on a Saturday morning might be a little early for a nineties country kitchen dance party, but not in Antonio Maletis’s house. It’s one of the many reasons she shouldn’t be living with her dad anymore.
