Page 61 of Here We Go Again

She can’t calm down because Joe keeps wheezing. Odysseus starts whining, and don’t dogs have a sixth sense for when their owners are in trouble? “Joe! Please say something!”

“M-my… chest… It hurts… when I try to breathe…”

“We should call an ambulance!”

Logan doesn’t argue. In a flurry of half-numb hands, Rosemary tries to find her phone. Her fingers feel disconnected from her body as she dials 911.

The wait for the ambulance is the longest fifteen minutes of her entire life. They manage to get Joe back to the parking lot before the paramedics arrive, and then they’re both in the Gay Mobile, Logan behind the wheel, following the ambulance through Albuquerque.

Google Maps says the University of New Mexico hospital is eighteen minutes away, but they get there in ten, pulling up in front of the ER. They both jump out of the car to watch Joe get wheeled inside on a gurney. A nurse gives them directions.

“Only one of us can go into triage with him,” Rosemary tells Logan.

“You should be the one to go,” Logan says with a flippant shrug. “I know he’s going to be okay.”

Rosemary wants to shake Logan. She wants to scream at her.You care. I know you care.

Please, please, show me you care.

But instead she simply turns away from her old friend and hurries into the emergency room behind Joe.

Chapter Eighteen

ROSEMARY

“Gas.”

Rosemary is beyond her emotional capacity from three hours in the UNM emergency room—and then another hour sitting in a waiting room after they transferred him upstairs—and she’s certain that’s why she has misheard the doctor.

“Excuse me?”

“Joe isn’t having a heart attack,” the young Indigenous doctor tells them. “He just had gas.”

Logan snorts into her strawberry milkshake. “Gas?”

“Yep! Something he ate clearly didn’t sit with him, and he got heartburn and gas pain. But we gave him some simethicone and a laxative, and he was able to have a bowel movement, so he should be right as rain.”

Rosemary fixates on the doctor’s gold name tag. “Sonny Summers,” it says. Like all the name tags at UNM, it lists the doctor’s pronouns and tribal affiliation below that. “They/Them. Acoma Pueblo.”

She’s not sure what comfort she’s hoping to find in those etched letters, but she stares and stares until the words finally come. “That… this can’t just be gas.”

Dr. Summers frowns. “This is good news. Your dad is going to be fine. But given the aggressive nature of his cancer, we want to keep him overnight for observation, just to be safe.”

“He’s not our dad,” Logan says after another slurp of her shake. Rosemary is confronted by the indifferent expression on Logan’s face.

The doctor nods, even though they’re clearly confused about the dynamics between these three people. “I was surprised to hear Joseph is on a road trip, given the severity of his condition. We found calcium deposits in his lungs, and I’m not sure further travel is what’s best for him.”

“It’s not,” Logan says. “But it’s what he wants.”

The doctor cuts their gaze between Rosemary and Logan. “I’ll give you some materials on our palliative care options just in case,” they say. “In the meantime, you’re both welcome to go back and see him.”

At that, the doctor turns away and swipes their badge against a keypad into a back room.

“I told you he was fine,” Logan says. She has her feet kicked up on a waiting room coffee table next to theHighlightsmagazines, and she takes another obnoxious sip of her almost-empty milkshake, and it’s like the last few days never happened. It’s almost as if Logan never began peeling back the layers of her apathetic mask. This is the flippant, smirking, asshole Logan, and Rosemary needs to get the fuck out of here right now.

She’s out of her chair before she knows where she’s going. Her angry legs take her to the bank of elevators, but when she presses the call button, and an elevator doesn’t immediately open, she takes the stairs instead.

“Hale! Stop!”