Disclaimer: I disclaim it. Leave it in the able hands of ASP and Dorothy Parker Drank Here.
Author's Note: This story is dedicated to breast cancer survivors – the sons, husbands, brothers, daughters, mothers and sisters.
---
October filled Connecticut with color. The crisp blue sky was a backdrop on the landscape of gold and scarlet in the trees. Leaf peepers brought with them striped scarves and bold quilted coats. Luke could appreciate the extra business, the Red Sox in the play-offs, and though he wouldn't spread it around, he lived in New England for this time of year, when the foliage went out with a bang before everyone hunkered down for the winter. And lately, now for the second October in a row, he welcomed the nip in the air at night because it meant having Lorelai squashed up next to him in their bed, always nuzzling some part of her body against him in her sleep. When they enveloped themselves together within a thick layer of blankets, well, he never wanted to leave that shelter.
But the month, the whole season really, was not without an autumn melancholy for Luke. The shorter days meant colder, darker mornings, for one thing. On one of those dark mornings, early in the month, Luke kissed Lorelai's cheek, rosy warm and creased with sleep, tucked the quilt deeply under her on both sides, the way she liked it, and left the house en route to the diner to meet the bread guy.
When he moved into Lorelai's house, Luke became a commuter, of sorts, for the first time in his life. The five minute drive into town gave him a little time each day to take in his surroundings and reflect. He usually found himself trying to put his finger on something, a word to describe the soft face that Lorelai made when he cooked dinner at the house, or to consider the growing pride he felt when he helped the crew put the finishing touches on the bedroom extension. This morning, though, he didn't have to put his finger on what he felt – the weight creeping in his chest was all too familiar, he recognized it instantly.
For years, the leaves turning had been the first visual association with his dad's death. Around this time, sixteen years ago, Bill Danes had come home from the hospital, feeling better, but weak, because he was on so much pain medication. Because that was all that was left for him. He had spent the last few weeks of his life setting his records in order from a hospice bed, listening to baseball series on the radio and watching the leaves change and fall with a peaceful finality. Luke had been there for it all. They didn't talk much, especially not about the medicine or the pain or the end. But they spent that time together, father and son. So it was hard for Luke to watch the leaves fall and not think about his dad. He never decided, all those years ago, to have his 'dark day,' it just approached, and it happened, and he didn't know how to feel it any other way.
Luke thought he was just being stoic, wrapping his grief around his neck like a scarf that he wore with a sulky pride, letting it tighten at his throat with every breath. Withdrawing into the sadness that he resented because he didn't want to think about memories when they only made him angry.
But Lorelai, with her gentle patience, her encouraging eyes and her hand lovingly in his, had showed him how to trust himself with the memories of his father again by showing him that he could trust her with his heart. He could tell her story by story, offer to her ears the things that he remembered best and the things that he barely remembered at all. And she listened. Somehow, she listened to every story just the way he needed her to; she hugged around his chest when he needed her closeness, she understood just when he wanted to hear her laughter, she lay beside him, spooned against his chest in the dark when he still needed to hide a little bit of himself as he whispered out the memory.
She had taught him not to store up his sadness and anger until that one day, pushing any feelings away and then punishing himself for twenty-four hours. That he could spend the anniversary of his father's death more peacefully if the one day didn't become such a sudden, brutal onslaught of pain, like opening the junk closet too quickly and having everything spill out. Slowly, he was beginning to feel at peace with his memories. He no longer felt so haunted.
And though he could already feel the darkness of that one November day approaching, Luke was learning to feel the pain of his loss at other moments. Not frequently, but when it approached, he would let it into him and allowed himself a private moment of silence or an honorary afternoon off for a solemn drive out to the lake. There, he could let his mind drift without chasing away things he wouldn't let himself remember. Letting his heart open up every now and then made room for more memories, ones that he had buried very intentionally because he had to, just to make it through. It seemed another lifetime when he had lost his other parent; his mom seemed so far away.
Luke, as a child, had been all boy from the start. By the time he finished pre-school, his relationship with his mother was almost wholly food-based: freshly baked cookies between school and Little League, a sack lunch to take on a Saturday fishing trip. There was also the occasional flash card review before a multiplication quiz and perhaps a game of monopoly if he stayed home sick from school. It was his dad that he wanted to impress with a good grade in math, though, and the hardware store was where he begged to spend the afternoon, even if he had missed school. He was very much, innately so, his father's son.
But even now, as an adult, and maybe even because he had reached that certain point in his life when a man begins to think about those things, like parenthood, he had an awareness that he had always been his mother's son. That he had grown accustomed to the sway of her cotton dresses, been comforted by her lullabies and felt safe in her soft warmth, all before he was old enough to really understand the depth of it; the kind of safety that was more than a roof over his head. And of course he loved her, and always knew that she loved him. When he was old enough to spend afternoons at his father's heels in the hardware store, his mother would drop by with her big canvas purse and ask to speak to Luke Danes, which made him feel like a grown up even if she ruffled his hair before she left. At the lake every summer, when he called out for his father to watch him cannonball off the dock, his mother, in a beach chair and a wide-brimmed hat, would look up from her book and watch, too.
He imagined a memory that he would have been too young to have, in which he was wrapped in a tiny quilt and tucked into his mother's arms under the luminous canopy of her face and hair as she nursed him. Later, when she weaned him from mother's milk and onto those after school snacks and pot roast dinner on Sundays, she still fed him wholly from her heart.
Luke was old enough to remember the dark days after her mastectomy, which still frightened him too much to contemplate. During the treatment that followed, as if the lost of her breast had not given her enough heartbreak, his mother was too weak to bake cookies or even thaw a pot roast. The idea of reducing her family to frozen dinners was too much for her to bear. She had already lost too much of herself. She wanted to go on providing for her husband and children, but not by the mere press of the button on the microwave. And while Liz would have been more than happy to eat her freezer burned brownie and a block of something chicken-like out of a tray while Bob Barker spun wheels on "The Price Is Right," Luke somehow understood the depth of his mother's sorrow. How desperate she was to hold on to her role, to feed her children with food that she prepare, the way she had done since they were infants at her breast.
With Liz running rampant with her friends and Bill spending more and more time at the hardware store, Luke found himself standing around the house with his hands in his pockets, wanting to do something, something to help, something to cope, just something. One evening, he found his mom leaning over the sink in the kitchen, gripping the edge of the countertop with her frail, white knuckles. Without thinking, he rushed to her side, cradling her head, thinking she was sick. She sank against him and he felt her body shaking in his arms. She wasn't sick, no more so than usual anyway. She was crying silently over the sink.
"I feel stir-crazy if I stay in bed but I get dizzy when I stand up and just the smell of any poultry makes my stomach turn and I just don't know what to do," she wept into his shoulder, forgetting for a moment that he was just her son, letting her guard down before his eyes in a way she hadn't done with anyone.
"Here, here, Mom. Just sit here." With his arms around her, Luke guided his mom to her chair at the kitchen table and lowered her into it, using a dishtowel to blot at her tears the way she had always done for him and Liz when they came in crying about a scrape. He pulled her sweater off a hook on the back of the kitchen door and draped it around her shoulders, then pushed up his sleeves and went to stand over the chicken she had been seasoning. "Will you teach me how to do it?" he asked, just trying to distract her and ease her burden. She sniffled a little, but he heard no trace of tears in her voice when she spoke.
"A pinch of the basil, that's the green one, to your left…" she began. Neither of them mentioned the tears again, not to Bill or Liz or even each other. She taught him how to cook and bake without recipes, just watching from her post at the table and training his hand with "A pinch…no, a little more…no, I said a dash, babe, that's a handful." She left questions unasked, about what his friends were doing or where he would be if not in the kitchen, often wearing an apron, with his mother. They talked about school a little, about girls only once, but mostly shared a companionable banter about steaming and broiling and baking. When a meal was finished, she would rise and come to look proudly over her son's shoulder as he served plates for the family.
Luke's father and sister must have assumed that his mom was managing dinner every night, and neither Luke nor his mother hinted otherwise. On occasion, someone would say, "this is delicious," or "good dinner, Mom," and she would say nothing, but smile, and meet her son's eyes over the table. Finally, one night, Bill spoke around a mouthful of mashed potatoes, "You've really outdone yourself tonight, honey." Luke's mother folder her napkin, leaned back from the table and said, "Actually, our son prepared dinner for us tonight." Luke blushed as his dad chuckled and clapped him on the back. He met his mother's eyes again; she was proud and smiling. She had passed on everything she could, given him the last bit of herself and felt satisfied with her legacy. She died, smiling peacefully, a few days later.
Luke hadn't realized how deeply he had repressed those memories of his mother until he allowed himself to feel them again. And yet, he realized that she had been with him every time he stood over the stove in the diner or his apartment or at Lorelai's, her even voice guiding his measurements and mixtures all this time. He had kept her close after all.
---
"I'm here! Coffee please, and good morning," Lorelai called out as she marched into the diner, balancing a small shopping bag on to a stool and hopping on the stool beside it.
"I noticed, coffee's almost ready, and –what's that for?" Luke asked, pointing directly at her with a wide-eyed stare.
"Hmmm, it's weird, huh?" she replied, wrinkling her nose as she glanced down at the pink ribbon pinned to her jacket and then back up at Luke. "Kirk had these set aside, for posterity or something? But I wanted to use them to serve a better purpose."
"And what purpose is that?" he asked, still eyeing the ribbon.
"Well, it's October."
"And, so?"
"October is Breast Cancer Awareness month, Luke, and," she reached over to place her hand on top of his when she saw him set his jaw, "this year, I wanted to do something, something special, in honor of your mom."
"Lorelai, you don't need to," Luke slipped his hand away and placed his hand on top of hers.
"And to honor you."
"What?"
"You're a survivor, Luke. You, and your family, are a part of what this is about," she insisted, indicating her pink ribbon. "And I always support the cause, but, I just feel like this means something more to me now. You know, I'm going to be a part of your family." Luke sighed, seeing the sincerity in her eyes. He had shared that part of his life with her, invited her into it. And as she always did, she had come to stand devotedly by his side. Nodding, he looked down at his feet, but now placed both of his hands over hers on the counter. "Luke, I'm not asking you to wear a pink ribbon or anything," she promised, and smiled when he rolled his eyes, "but I would really like to, if…if that's okay with you."
"It's okay, Lorelai, it's okay," he answered softly, truthfully, after a moment. She smiled brightly up at him and he squeezed her hand, then turned, finally, to pour a cup of coffee. While his back was turned, Lorelai dipped her hand into the shopping bag at her side, lifted out a single item and placed it on the counter beside the register. When Luke turned around with a brimming mug and saw the jar of pink ribbons placed before him, he stopped so short he sloshed a little over the rim.
"Wait a minute, what's that for?" he asked again, slightly irritated, as Lorelai nearly bounced with enthusiasm.
"You don't have to wear one but if you kept these here people could take one when they pay and wear it on the way out and they wouldn't even have to know why they are here, but you will and I will and we'll get to see even more people showing their support," she blurted out as fast as she could, trying to beat Luke to his 'no.'
Shaking his head, Luke rounded the counter, reaching for the jar, "I really don't think this is gonna work, it doesn't go with the décor, I've got a style going on here, and the clientele won't…"
"The clientele will appreciate it. They'll think it's nice because it is nice. Please?" Lorelai protected the jar of ribbons with one hand and placed the other up on Luke's shoulder. He sighed with resignation, but his expression was thoughtful.
He fingered the satin ribbon on her lapel. Lorelai watched his face for a moment as he did so. She squeezed his shoulder and ran her hand down his arm. Then, trying to diffuse the sad memory in his eyes before it became greater than this heartfelt tribute she was making in his name, reached up to clasp his hand and crush his all of his fingers salaciously against her breast, immediately causing Luke to howl "Aww geez," and tear his hand away, giving Lorelai a warning glare as he retreated behind the counter.
"What? October is the one month when it is acceptable, encouraged even, it should be required, to fondle your fiancé in public. And you're not going to take advantage?"
"No, I am not."
"Should we feel insulted?" Lorelai asked with a pout as she craned her neck to appraise the tops of her own breasts.
"I'll make it up to you…all of you…later, at home." Lorelai grinned back at him with wicked satisfaction. "Here, take this, get out of here," he said, pushing a paper bag and a to-go cup across the counter at her. He busied himself with something behind the counter as she collected her things. "And this," he pushed a napkin into her hand.
"I won't need this, trust me, babe, hand to mouth," she assured him, miming herself stuffing a donut into her mouth in one bite.
"Just, just take it," he insisted.
"Fine, okay." She looked down at the napkin. Luke had scribbled Thank you for this, Lorelai along one edge. She smiled back at him and nodded once in response, then kissed his cheek over the counter and went on her way to deliver several more jars of pink ribbons to store counters in town.
Luke watched her go, could see her digging her donut out of the paper bag before she even reached the other side of the street. He hoped she knew just how much he had to thank her for. One donut was the just the beginning.
-end-