Page 100 of Here We Go Again

She’s sweating after a few steps through the neighborhood, and Odie is walking cautiously, like he can’t quite trust the enjoyment of the outing. Without realizing it, Logan is suddenly holding her phone.

She’s pressing the favorites button in her contacts.

“Chicken!” Her father shouts after two rings. “How are you?”

His cheerful voice and the sound of music in the background feel jarring. She imagines him dancing around the kitchen with his spatula, and then she’s crying again.

“Logan?” he says gently but seriously. She wants to reassure him that everything is okay, but nothing is okay, and all she can do is put one foot in front of the other and sob into the phone. “He’s going to die, Dad.”

Her dad is silent on the other end except for the sound of a slow, steady exhale.

“I don’t… I can’t… I haven’t been able to accept that he’s dying and now he is. I don’t want him to die.”

“No,” her dad says. “I know you don’t, my Chicken.”

“It is going to hurt like a punch to the tit.”

“It is,” he says.

“It… it’s going to hurt like it did when Mom left.”

“It will,” Antonio echoes quietly. “It has to. Joe isworththat hurt.”

“You don’t understand, Dad,” she blathers into the phone, but the truth is, she doesn’t understand, either. She doesn’t know why it’s so hard for her to let in that hurt. “I… I don’t know how to love halfway,” she reasons aloud. “I don’t know how to care just a little bit. If I let myself care at all, I’m going to care with every ounce of my being. And if I do that, and I lose them, it will hurt like hell.”

She’s not sure if she’s talking about Joe or Rosemary or both of them. The sun is blinding and she can’t see a thing.

“And… and I don’t know how to hurt halfway, either,” she continues. “I don’t know how to feel anything in moderation.”

There is no silence on the other end this time. “Ah, but Chicken,” her dad says immediately. “Your big feelings are one of the most beautiful things about you.”

It takes her twenty-four hours to go see Joe.

Rosemary doesn’t leave his bedside once over the course of that first day, and Logan finds a million excuses not to see his bedside at all. She has to take care of Odie. She has to go get dinner for Remy and Rosemary. She has to get Joe a change of clothes.

Someone needs to run to Rouses for supplies.

Someone needs to make sure the gallery is still doing okay.

Someone needs to get a good night’s sleep.

She doesn’t sleep well, though, and when she gets to the hospital midmorning on Monday, she finds Remy waiting for her next to the Louis Armstrong quote. “He’s awake,” Remy says, throwing his arms wide around Logan. He smells like bleach and stale coffee, and he holds Logan as tight as he can against his chest. “They were able to take him off the BiPap machine, and he’s talking and everything. Rosemary is with him now.”

Logan immediately cycles through her excuses, but then she learns that Joe’s first order of business after regaining consciousness was to tell Rosemary she smells like dirty feet and order her to go to Remy’s, shower, and sleep. Remy got the same marching orders.

Logan sees Rosemary as she passes through the waiting room. She looks pale and exhausted, with bloodshot eyes and purple bags under them, her hair is stringy and unwashed, still loaded with the gel they used the night of the drag show.

Logan wants to reach out to her, but Rosemary won’t even look at her. She brushes right past.

With Remy and Rosemary gone, someone has to go sit with Joe.

“You look like shit,” she says from the doorway to his hospital room. In bed, Joe turns his head slowly toward her and his eyes go wide.

“No! Nurses! Not her!” He reaches for the call button. “Nurses! Help! Not the mean one!”

Logan rolls her eyes. “That must be one hell of a fentanyl patch.”

“I’m sorry.” Joe blinks up at her. “Who are you?”