Page 9 of Here We Go Again
“My nurse is Kelsey Tanner, and she heard about it from her hairdresser’s boyfriend, who saw the whole thing in the Applebee’s parking lot.”
“I hate this town.”
“Yet you refuse to leave.” Joe raises a grizzled eyebrow at her. “Please tell me you weren’t aiming for Rosemary. Attempted vehicular manslaughter is taking your little feud a step too far.”
“I didn’t hither. I hit her car. And it was really more of a tap. And if that tap happened to injure Hale’s brittle bones, well… that’s just an unexpected perk.”
“Thirty-two is a little old for a mortal enemy.”
“Not if that enemy is Rosemary Hale.” She folds her arms across her chest. “Remember how she used to correct all our teachers back in school, except for you? Well, she still does that, but with our coworkers in reply-all emails. And she’s always bringing essays to staff meetings so she can grade them in her lap. Like,we get it. You teach AP. You’re very important.”
Joe opens his mouth, but Logan plows on. “And remember that time junior year when she made Ivy Tsu cry after the regional debate competition because Ivy used the wrong color pen? I think she made everyone on the Speech and Debate team cry at least once. She was a little despot in Mary Janes.”
Joe smirks up at her from his bed. “Did she ever makeyoucry?”
So, so many times.
“No, because I don’t care what Hale thinks of me.”
Joe scrunches his face in an exaggerated expression of skepticism, and Logan thinks about Hale in that parking lot, snarled into knots with anxiety. She thinks about her overwhelming urge to comfort her, like she used to. “Look, enough about Satan’s stepdaughter. Let’s talk about you. You look like shit, by the way.”
He does a mock bow in his bed. “Thank you, darling. I call this chemo chic.” He flourishes his hands. “Also, you seem to have a sock inside your bra, so let’s not cast aspersions.”
She pulls out the sock and waves it dismissively. “You broke your foot? Did you try to poop without your walker again?”
“No, I broke it while salsa dancing with Antonio Banderas.”
“Don’t strain your groin trying to be funny, old man.”
He holds up one wrinkled middle finger and shoves it in her face. “I’m not old.”
Technically, he’s right. Joe Delgado is only sixty-four, but a long battle with pancreatic cancer has aged him like a time-lapse video. The Mr. Delgado of her memories had been larger than life in every way. Tall, with broad shoulders and a booming voice, his thick blackhair was always too long and too messy, but in a way that just made sense for his personality, like he was too brilliant to waste time on something as commonplace as hygiene. A mad scientist, but his science was syntax and diction. He always spoke in animated gestures with hands the size of baseball mitts; his dark brown eyes sparkled whenever he talked about Toni Morrison or iambic pentameter, coordinating conjunctions or Gabriel García Márquez. “El gran poder existe en la fuerza irresistible del amor.”
For almost thirty years, he taught ninth grade English and AP Literature and coached the Speech and Debate team at Vista Summit High School. He’d raised two generations of kids in this town. He’d definitely raised her.
She started ninth grade as a social pariah. Outed at the end of the summer, she went into high school as the lesbian with no friends and a mom who left her for another family. She thought she’d never belong, but there he was. Joseph Delgado, a beloved openly gay teacher at an aggressively conservative high school. He had a pride flag above the projector screen and a decorative scarf around his neck, and he never apologized for being exactly who he was: a gay son of Mexican immigrants who loved teaching young people how to empower themselves through reading and writing.
Mr. Delgado was the first adult who ever truly made Logan feelokay. Okay for being gay. Okay for having ADHD and a brain that worked a little differently. He helped her harness the creative chaos of her mind. He got her to join the Speech and Debate team.
He nurtured her love of books.
He helped her get into college.
She became an English teacher because of him. When she first started working at Vista Summit High School, they’d meet at Rochelle’s for milkshakes on Fridays after work, to debrief the week, and he would give her advice on how to connect with the students she couldn’t reach and on the department politics she could never understand. They’d grade papers together at Java Jump on Saturdaymornings. They’d talk pedagogy in the living room of his old Victorian house off Main Street while Van Morrison spun on the record player.
He was her teacher, her role model, her surrogate parent. Her mentor, her coworker, her best friend.
And then, two days before his sixtieth birthday, he got the diagnosis. The doctors said they caught it early enough; they’d attack it aggressively. Surgery to remove the tumors. A year of rewatchingGilmore Girlsduring chemo, vomiting for days after each round. Watching that mad scientist hair fall out strand by strand. Adopting him a cancer dog because Logan didn’t know how else to help.
Remission and relapse. A clinical trial that took forty pounds and his ability to sleep. Surgery to remove the whole pancreas. Insulin injections that made him sick. More chemo.
The first fall, which broke his ankle and put him in rehab for three months. So much physical therapy. Selling his house because he couldn’t get up the stairs anymore.
The cancer coming back. In his liver this time.
After all that, the man in this hospital bed under the unflattering fluorescent lighting of Evergreen Pines isn’t larger than life. He’s too small, almost hollow-looking. His brown skin and his handsome face sags with new wrinkles. Clutching his beige blanket, his hands look like shrunken husks. She hates seeing him here, in this sterile room with vomit-colored walls, without his books or his vinyls or his dog. Evergreen Pines has a strict pet policy, and Odysseus has to go stay with some nice lesbians who own a farm a few towns over whenever Joe’s in rehab.
“Stop looking at me like that,” Joe barks.
