Page 113 of Here We Go Again

Still half-delirious, Rosemary decides she’s a little bit in love with Guillermo.

“Speaking of, are you hungry?”

Rosemary’s stomach feels like the Grand Canyon. “Um, a little…”

Guillermo makes atsksound and heads back to the kitchen. “I’ll heat up some okra.”

“Ah, hell yes!” Logan hoots. “Give me all that auto mechanic shrimp!”

Nurse Addison slides his stylus back into the breast pocket of his scrubs. “Our Joe seems to be in good health, all things considered. The fentanyl seems to still be helping with pain management, but if it gets worse, I can give him some morphine when I come back in the morning. Does that sound okay, Joe?”

Joe blushes again. Nurse Addison squeezes Joe’s shoulder, and Joe positively melts.

Once the nurse is gone, Logan whistles. “You old horn dog.”

“Joe.” Rosemary scoots even closer to his bed. “How are you?”

Joe licks his chapped lips, and Rosemary reaches for a small pink sponge and tries to wet his mouth. “I’m…,” Joe starts, then stops. He starts somewhere else entirely. “We made it to Maine, Rosie.”

She leans in and kisses his forehead. “We made it.”

The first few days in Bar Harbor fall into an easy rhythm. Nurse Addison arrives at the cottage at five in the morning sharp, when the view through the front windows is still moonlight and mystery. His arrival wakes up either Rosemary or Logan—whoever fell asleep beside Joe’s bed the night before. If it’s Rosemary, she asks Nurse Addison a dozen questions about Joe’s condition, but Nurse Addison’s answer is always the same: “He’s still alive.”

He’s not here to cure Joe. He’s here to make him comfortable.

Nurse Addison leaves and Guillermo arrives to make coffee andchange Joe’s diaper, his catheter. He gives him a spot bath, if he wants it, and rubs his feet when they start turning gray from lack of blood flow. As he completes these tasks, Rosemary drinks her coffee on the front porch while the sun rises over the Atlantic Ocean. Logan often joins her out there in the cold, her perpetually bare legs covered in goose bumps.

After coffee, Logan takes Odie for a walk, and in the evening Rosemary does, and in-between, that dog weasels his way onto the hospital bed with Joe, even though there’s no room for him.

Logan reads Joe Mary Oliver poems and his favorite novel,One Hundred Years of Solitude.Rosemary writes at her window upstairs, and then brings the pages downstairs to read them aloud to Joe after each session. Forward and forward and forward she presses into the story. She might write the whole thing before he’s gone.

For some reason, baseball is always playing on the old, wood-paneled TV, even though none of them care about sports. Guillermo feeds them Remy’s food, and when they start running out of that, he brings them his mother’s homemade tamales and his father’s pozole. Rosemary has no idea if this is part of his job, or if he does it simply because he cares.

Sometimes, Rosemary falls asleep in the reclining chair and wakes up to find someone put a blanket over her.

Rosemary writes and Logan reads and Joe sleeps and sleeps and sleeps.

No one says anything about their long-term plan, but Rosemary knows that both she and Logan are here until the end.

LOGAN

“Who is that handsome son of a bitch?” she asks when she gets home from a morning walk with Odie to discover Joe sitting up, eyes wide open. Rosemary’s feeding him reheated grits. Hesmiles, and Logan feels her heart stretch out in her chest, like its waking from a weeklong hibernation.

“More like decaying son of a bitch,” Joe manages, and his smile turns into a gas grimace.

Rosemary sets aside the grits. “Someone is in very good spirits this morning.”

“It sounds like the perfect morning to open your present from Remy, then.” Logan snatches up the gift-wrapped frame from the corner of the living room.

“Yes!” Rosemary beams. It’s clear she’s turned the optimism up to eleven, for Joe’s sake. “Great idea!”

“Let’s see what yourlovergave you!”

Joe doesn’t have the dexterity to tear the paper, so Rosemary helps as Logan holds it up in front of him. The paper falls away, then the Bubble Wrap, and then they’re all staring at another nude painting of Joseph Delgado.

At first glance, it’s just like the one from before: Joe, in a bathtub, looking boldly at the artist. But this isn’t twenty-five-year-old Joe. It’s sixty-four-year-old Joe. This is the same Joe that’s in the hospital bed in front of her. The Joe who is dying. And he’s absolutely beautiful.

Remy has rendered him magnificent, like an ancient redwood tree, the wrinkles around his eyes as deep as grooves in the bark.