Incompatible

Chapter 1: The Talk

If she had a mirror she would have been able to see the shock that she would later say was completely inappropriate. She had a tendency to self-edit long after those moments in her daily life where she would jump into a situation or conversation without a filter. Her after the fact self-editing fueled what everyone else called her neurosis but she instead self-diagnosed herself as having a strong sense of second-hand embarrassment. Instead of feeling it for someone else, the second-handed nature was directed at herself, separated by time. The Lorelai of five minutes ago, five hours ago, fifteen years and a steady and uncomfortable stream of "what ifs" that spread out like a web of broken glass. It was for her and her regrets that she turned over and over with nitpicky detail.

Later she would tell herself that her face hadn't fully conveyed what she'd wanted it to convey and her daughter was reading more into her reaction then she should have but there was nothing to do in the moment. In the moment, Rory saw the disappointed shock in her mother's face and accepted it as something she expected.

"And you're sure?" She asked which she would later want to retract as a stupid question.

"Pretty sure," Rory said. She said it with a calm self assurance that her slightly trembling hands betrayed as false.

She wanted to push the "pretty sure" into a bit. Ramble for a few minutes to separate the reality from settling in but this was a moment she knew should only be derailed by Armageddon, not puns or allusions to Rosemary's Baby. Personally, despite the shock on her face, she wasn't angry or disappointed, not really which was probably the source of the shock. How could she not be? But she wasn't. Void would be a better word for the way she felt. Her daughter was 32, educated, and unattached. The reality was, if she too waited until 48 to get 'happily ever after' married, as Lorelai had just done, there would be a push by Paris Geller to invade Rory's mid-life with talks of 'breeders' and that image sent more of a shock to her system then hearing that her daughter was pregnant.

"Logan?" Lorelai asked. Rory nodded. "And if it was . . ." she tried; she really tried to remember that kid's name—

"Paul—"

"Right, if it was Paul's—"

"It's not."

"You have to be sure about this. You don't want to find out the wrong way that it's—um—it's—" Jesus Christ, what was that kid's name?!

"Paul's. I'm sure." Well. 99.9% sure but the fact of the matter was, Rory couldn't even be sure she'd ever seen Paul without his shirt much less if they'd ever had sex. He was like dating a black hole. He was nice (she'd remember mean) he was attentive (inattention irritated her) and he cared. Why did she treat him so badly? What was her defect? Why did she only seem to respond to drama? Then she had a thought that she had to push away to think on later . . . maybe she was the black hole.

"Does he know?"

"Not yet." Rory could see the question in her mom's features and knew that the apprehensive eggshell look meant a very specific question she knew she couldn't ask her. She answered the question anyway, "I'm going to tell him. I am. I just don't . . ."

"Know how?"

Rory looked down and clamped her fingers together to stop their shaking. "I know if I tell him he'll be there for me. For us. I guess it's us now." That was a weird feeling that just passed over her.

Lorelai had such a strange feeling hearing Rory say that. Us. Her kid is an us. Her kid was about to become two people. Her kid was gonna have her own kid. "And that's . . . bad?"

"I . . ." Why was this so hard? She knew for such a long time that the situation she and Logan were in was because she'd made it very clear that she never wanted a commitment from him. At every turn he kept trying to extend himself, almost begging her to make an announcement that everything was right in the world, that she needed him, that she wanted him, in more ways than she was willing to give him. She loved Logan, it was true, but there was something just as equally true. "I don't want to marry him."

Lorelai put her hand on her daughter's shoulder and trained her gaze on hers. "Okay, listen, you know when a guy asks you out and your mind goes through first date, second date, meet the parents, good sex, bad sex, first fight, engagement, marriage, five kids, grandkids, and then he sees all of it in your face and he interrupts with a 'it's just a drink' and you have to accept the fact that 'it's just a drink.'"

"This is a baby, not a Long Island Iced Tea, mom."

"And he's engaged." And this was a message she'd wanted to get through to her daughter when she found out that she was sleeping with an engaged Logan Huntzberger. "You think he'd drop her if he found out?"

Rory realized something in this conversation that she had only just been poking at in the corners of her consciousness. She understood it when she visited her dad and understood just how different he was to Logan. Thinking through her notes for the book she tried to paint archetypes for all the characters involved and when writing out the character sheet for Logan she realized, in a way that only dispassionate observation could reveal, he was similar to someone very close to her who decidedly wasn't her dad and the rabbit hole opened up.

"I think he just wants one unimpeachable reason to run away from everything. I think he hates his family, hates his responsibility to them and he'll leave everything with a good enough reason." She tried not to make her gaze into her mother's blue eyes so pointed but she couldn't help it. "I'm his Christopher."

"Oh kid, that's . . . that's not fair." Did Rory just compare her to Logan Huntzberger? Was Rory saying that she was Logan Huntzberger?

"Mom, I'm not attacking you or him it's just, how I see it—"

It hit her like a cartoon piano. "Oh my God, I am Logan Huntzberger—" she got up from the Gazebo and started blindly pacing.

"Mom—"

"If I hadn't had you at 16 then yeah, he'd be me, I'd be him. The resentment, the inability to define my boundaries with my parents until complete and total capitulation—"

"Mom—"

"The running around, the secrecy, the self-destructive behavior—"

"Hey—"

"Mitchum and Shira are my parents, aren't they? But like, through the Upside Down, right?"

"Um—"

"If he had a uterus, he'd be teaching basket weaving in New Haven by now."

It was a truth bomb and Rory pointed to her mom as if she had just made a touchdown. "Exactly!"

Lorelai exhaled and turned to Rory. She looked like a baby, still. "You have to tell him, kid."

"I know."

"And sooner rather than later."

"I know."

". . . and I did love your dad."

"I know . . ." Rory also knew that the kind of love her mom and dad had shared, the kind of unaffiliated love she and Logan had for one another, wasn't the kind of love that could thrive in a marriage. They were in love with the promise of the other, with the world the other came from. His travel, her roots. His adventure, her aspiration. They were escapees but they could never survive if one completely transferred over into the other's life. In the end, there would be the two of them and a baby, not a family. Rory wanted her child to have a family, not uncomfortable and quiet resentments. Marriage would ruin her relationship with Logan though it would probably fulfill him in ways that couldn't be quantified. They wouldn't be happy together, but he'd be happy in situ. She could fulfill his happiness by sacrificing her own and that was a road that led to bitterness. She wanted what her grandparents had. She wanted what her mom and Luke had. She wanted something Logan couldn't give.

"I'm scared," Rory said. She was seeing her life turn in a way that she wasn't prepared for.

Lorelai went to her daughter, wrapping her arms around her. "You'd be stupid not to be scared."

"Okay." Rory said with an awkward finality. "What do we tell Luke?"

"That he just married into being a grandpa, yay?" It was then that Lorelai realized something and gasped with a strange smile. "I'm gonna be a grandma."

"I'm glad you can drill this down to the important points. I'm gonna be a mom."

"Oh please, moming is easy. Where am I gonna get quarter of a million to pay for your kid to go to Chilton? And who knows what that's gonna look like after a decade of inflation?"

"I think baby Huntzberger will be okay for money, mom."

"Please, once Logan finds out he's a dad and renounces the throne so he can work at the Dragonfly annex as Suki's prep chef, it'll be all up to me, babe."

"Hilarious."

"And baby Huntzberger? Really? I was not referring to you as baby Hayden at any point in my pregnancy."

"I like Huntzberger."

"So does Angela Merkel."

"How about we wait until she or he is big enough to have arms before we decide on names."

"Détente. Agreed." She shrugged. "At least you're not his Peter."

"Paul."

"Mary?" Lorelai grinned. "I could have gone Rubens but April reminded me of Puff, the Magic Dragon."

"You're taking this better than I thought you would. You kind of looked, I don't know, upset before."

Lorelai took a breath, relaxed her expression and then said, "You were valedictorian of your class; you went to Yale and left your 20s more or less unscathed. You traveled the world and lived your dreams. How unreasonable would I be to expect more than that?"

"I'm not married. I don't have a paying job. I live at home—"

"I can kick you out and you can solve the last two pretty quickly. The first is gonna depend on a lot with luck being number one."

Rory clung to her mother. "Please don't kick me out."

She kissed her forehead. "If you promise not to run away." Just the idea sent a pang through her core.

"I don't know how you did it," Rory quietly mused. Raising a baby on her own? She couldn't even live on her own. It was always a mistake her mom made in comparing herself to Rory. The next nine months was going to be a make or break challenge. She had to be more like her mom and less like her dad if this kid had any shot at stability.

Lorelai, in thinking of her mother, of her parents, what they went through when she left and now imagining what it would feel like if Rory left . . . there was a pain there she never could comprehend until that moment. A pain her mother had tried to vocalize for 32 years but had never made sense until that minute. It was different, so different. It was greater than she had ever imagined. What would she think or feel if Rory just disappeared one day with a baby in her arms, to live somewhere so completely not of her own environment. "I don't know either."