Page 50 of Here We Go Again

When her question is met with silence, she swivels in her seat to find Joe nervously pulling apart bits of a stale muffin from the continental breakfast. “Joe? What do you want to see next?”

“Bar Harbor?” Hale tries.

Joe throws the muffin at her.

“Don’t hit me with cheap breakfast foods! I don’t do spontaneous, and you hesitated!”

“I think we should go to… Santa Fe?” His voice lilts like this is a question.

“Are you sure?”

He looks like Hale the day she got heat exhaustion, but he nods slowly. “I’m… I’m sure.”

Logan has never heard Joseph Delgado sound less sure of anything.

“Why Santa Fe?” Hale asks.

Joe stares out the window at the Best Western parking lot. “Because I’ve never been. And I… I should probably go.” His tone is almost defeated.

Logan shoots Hale a look, but she shrugs in similar confusion. Hale’s braid is looser today with a few strands already falling down around her face. Logan could easily tuck them behind Hale’s ear if she wanted to.

She pushes on her sunglasses. “Then Santa Fe it is.”

Cortez, Colorado to Santa Fe, New MexicoChapter Fifteen

LOGAN

The drive is breathtaking. She fell in love with red rocks in southern Utah, but heading south into New Mexico is even more beautiful somehow. It has never occurred to her that there were mountains in the desert, but these ones are even more magnificent than the ones back home. These craggy red mountains look molded out of sculpting clay and stretch their peaks up into an endless blue sky. There are trees—not as magnificent as the ones back home, but still—and they look lovely, dotted across the brown expanse of valley.

She drives, and the road seems to stretch out forever in front of her. The windows are down, and she’s completely sober and still entirely free.

This is summer. This is what she needed. Wind in her hair and fresh air in her lungs and something new to look at. She keeps glancing over at Hale, whose braid is royally fucked now. Huge chunks of hair have fallen out in the wind, and they whip across her face. But Hale, being Hale, fights the wind, holding up her hands and batting away every rogue chunk of hair out of her face.

Hair keeps flying and Hale keeps fighting. Logan laughs wildly, and the sound drifts through the open window. “Just surrender to the chaos already!”

She makes a stubborn face, and in that expression, Logan sees the little girl who could never turn down a dare to jump off the tallest rock, to jump into the coldest lake. “Never!” Hale shouts. She cranks her window back up and manages to smooth her hair back down. “Driver’s choice. What do you want to listen to?”

She smiles at Joe in the rearview mirror. “Let the dead man choose.”

Joe has been weird all morning, sulking as they get closer and closer to Santa Fe. Hale stretches the extra-long aux cord into the back seat so Joe can plug in his phone. He cues up Van for the van. “Tupelo Honey.”

Hale kicks off her heels and puts her feet up on the dashboard. Her toes jiggle in tune with the song. Logan swears she can hear her humming along.

She’s as sweet as Tupelo Honey.

“Apt,” Logan says to Joe in the rearview mirror.

Hale turns her head so Logan can see the smile on her pink lips. “Very apt.”

“You can sing the song, you know,” Logan tells her. “You don’t have to just hum it.”

Hale’s smile falters. “I don’t sing.”

“We’ll see about that.”

ROSEMARY

For the last hour of the drive, Logan takes control of the music, and she oscillates between singing “Santa Fe” fromRentand “Santa Fe” fromNewsies. At some point, Joe joins in, and Rosemary reaches for her AirPods.