Page 106 of Here We Go Again

He closes the side door. Odie wails from the back seat, then jumps into the front to sit on Logan’s lap so he can wail some more. Remy reaches through the window to scratch his ears one last time. Rosemary is already in the driver’s seat, putting on her own sunglasses to mask her tears.

Then she pulls away from the swamp gutter, away from the brick house where she was so happy and so sad, and away from Remy St. Patin.

“The South sucked anyway,” Logan says through her own phlegmy tears as they get back on the highway. “Dragonflies the size of seagulls? Who needs it?”

“And mosquitoes the size of dragonflies,” Rosemary adds. “And the goddamn swamp ass.”

“Lady fucking Gaga,” Logan splutter-sobs. “The swamp ass. Being outside is like swimming through a vat of gumbo. And it smells like ball sack.”

“And why is there always a Dollar General right next to a Dollar Tree? Come on, Mississippi, that’s just bad urban planning.” Rosemary chokes on a sob. She doesn’t want to cry right now—not about Joe and not about Logan. She wants to see the road in front of her. She wants to drive away from this place as fast as she can. “And the food is terrible. I’m still digesting most of it.”

“There are no mountains, no hills, no elevation at all. It’s justflat. And the live oaks with Spanish moss aren’t eventhatbeautiful.”

They both know it’s one of the most beautiful things they’ve ever seen.

“And the people weren’t eventhatnice.”

Rosemary thinks about Remy and Gladys and Dr. Rutherford. Of all the queens at drag night who cheered for Joe as he danced in his wheelchair.

“And the sunsets were mediocre at best.”

Rosemary thinks about that evening on the bayou, the perfect sunset and the perfect feeling of being in Logan’s arms.

Rosemary clicks on the blinker and pulls over onto the shoulder of I-10 so she can cry until they’re ready to move forward again.

LOGAN

Twenty-six hours.

That’s how long it will take them to get to Bar Harbor.

Twenty-six hoursstraightof driving, because it’s too painful for Joe to get in and out of the van. Twenty-six hours of looking over her shoulder, hoping Joe is still alive. Twenty-six hours trapped in a van three feet from Rosemary Hale, switching drivers every few hours. Remembering what they had and struggling to figure out how to get it back.Ifshe even wants to get it back.

Falling apart was inevitable, wasn’t it? They were playing house in Ocean Springs, but Logan was always going to find a way to fuck it all up. She was always going to push Rosemary away.

Through the rest of Mississippi and most of Alabama, Logan pretends everything is normal, like this is still any other day in their road trip across the country. She cues a playlist and DJs the best songs, dancing with her upper body, turning around to ask Joe things like, “Best party anthem of the early-aughts?”

Joe never responds, but Odie always whines like he’s trying to answer for Joe. And Odie is probably a Kesha stan.

She pulls Rosemary into inane conversations about vanity licenseplates and the abundance of Waffle Houses that are missing letters from their signs. She eats three of Remy’s biscuits for breakfast and stares out the window at the changing landscape once again. Goodbye, crepe myrtle and crabgrass. Goodbye, magnolia trees. Goodbye to the place where she let herself be open and vulnerable with Rosemary Hale. Goodbye to the place where she lost her.

In the next twenty-six hours, they will pass through ten states, all places Logan’s never been. She presses her forehead to the warm glass and feels a brief flare of sadness for all the things she won’t see along the way. They’ll pass it all by at sixty miles per hour, a blur of green trees and freeway walls until it gets dark.

They pass a rusted tractor turned over in a field of cotton now, and it strikes Logan as the loneliest thing she’s ever seen.

She’ll be back, she decides. She’ll return to the South (just maybe not in July). She’ll visit all the places from here to Maine, some day. Now that she’s seen some of the world, she’s hungry for all of it. Too hungry to stay in Vista Summit forever.

She laughs to herself, and her breath fogs up the window.

“What?” Rosemary asks.

“Joe was right,” Logan admits. He’s asleep in the back seat, still out of it from the fentanyl.

“Joe is always right,” she says. “What was he right about this time?”

“I had to go on this trip.”

ROSEMARY