Page 107 of Here We Go Again

She’s never been more miserable than she is in Alabama.

Losing Joe is going to hurt like hell, but losing Logan when she’s stillright here, an arm’s reach away behind that steering wheel—being next to Logan but not being allowed to touch her—is a kind of grief she isn’t prepared for. Like trying to mourn a ghost who won’t stop haunting her.

Joe is going to die, and they’re going to return to Vista Summit, and it will be like they never held each other in moonlight in the Gulf of Mexico.

In Montgomery, they get onto I-81 North, and Rosemary puts on the end of thePersuasionaudiobook. Logan doesn’t protest, and at one point, Rosemary looks over to catch her tearing up.

“Are you okay?”

Logan sniffles. “I get why you read this straight shit. It’s a really good book.”

Outside Chattanooga, they stop at a dog park so Odie can run around. She sits on a bench, forcing herself to eat cold tomato pie, thinking about all the unused pages of her binder. The things she prepared for that never happened, and all the things she never could’ve predicted. She tries not to think about how every minute brings them closer to Bar Harbor and further from each other.

The Southwest and Remy and the drag show. Falling for her. Letting her walk away.

“I’ve been thinking about Odie,” she says while the dog chases birds around the open field.

“What’s there to think about?” Logan asks. Her Tupperware of tomato pie is completely empty.

“I’ve been thinking about what happens to Odieafter…”

She doesn’t sayJoe dies. They never really say it, not fully, not aloud. The Gay Mobile is parked right behind them, the side door open, the baby monitor connecting them to Joe. “Someone will need to take the dog,” she says down to her still-full portion of tomato pie. “I-I know it took me a while to warm to him, but I think I should do it. I should take him.”

“You don’t have to do that,” Logan says quickly. “I can take him.”

“No, no. You live with your dad, and you don’t want to sign Antonio up for that.”

“But you have intense cat energy.”

“Yes, but for some inexplicable reason, he likes me better, so Ishould—” On cue, Odie races over and thrusts his head onto Rosemary’s lap, pushing the pie onto the ground. She obeys the tacit command and scratches him behind the ears.

“It’s not so inexplicable,” Logan says quietly. Rosemary doesn’t know what to do with that comment, so she lets it blow away in the Tennessee summer breeze.

She presses her face into Odie’s fur. At least she won’t lose him.

LOGAN

“You need to eat something,” Logan tells Rosemary in a McDonald’s parking lot in Roanoke, Virginia.

“I’m not hungry,” Rosemary snaps, which is proof that she is. She sits in the back seat next to Joe, wringing a wet paper towel into his mouth, so he’ll drinksomething.

“Have some fried chicken.” Logan outstretches a nugget.

Rosemary swats it away. “I’m definitely not hungry for fried chicken.”

Logan isn’t particularly hungry for fried chicken, either, but she forces herself to take one listless bite after another because this is their dinner stop. Because she needs to keep her energy up. She needs to take care of herself so they can keep taking care of Joe.

Rosemary has had four iced coffees and maybe three bites of tomato pie all day. “Come on, Rosie. We’re not even halfway, and I can tell you’re fading. Please eat.”

“Don’t call me that!” she snaps again. She sounds like old Rosemary. Like the woman who would read her for filth in a staff meeting, like the woman who crashed into her car and still chewed her out, just to feel in control of something.

“Please,” Logan tries. “Take care of yourself.”

Rosemary’s face twists into a sneer, and then she stomps out of the van and across the parking lot. She disappears into McDonald’s in an angry huff. Odie makes distressing noises that mirror Logan’s distressing thoughts the entire time she’s gone.

Fifteen minutes later, Rosemary flies out of McDonald’s just as quickly as she went in, clutching a brown to-go bag in one hand and a half-eaten double cheeseburger in the other. She houses the rest of the burger before she even reaches the van. Face blotchy from crying and a dollop of ketchup in the corner of her mouth, and she looks like herself in this moment. The version of herself she unearthed over the course of this trip.

“I’m sorry,” Rosemary says. “I was hangry, and tired, and you—”