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Chapter 3

Summer 2009

Jess drove into Stars Hollow with the windows rolled down, his left hand lazily coasting outside, catching the warm July breeze as it flew by. He kept his foot firm on the gas pedal though, his perfect, consistent five-over-the-speed-limit betraying his urgency. Lorelai, in full-meltdown mode, had made the accident sound terrible over the phone, but Jess knew the woman better after a decade of drama. Had Luke been seriously hurt – truly life-threatened – she wouldn't have included the barrage of near-hysteric jokes and pop culture references and some long-winded anecdote about how Luke would inevitably fall to the drug epidemic if he ever managed to recover from the amputation and battlefield infection.

He pushed the speed a little faster. It was dangerous waters to speed in the land of Taylor Doose, but today it was worth the risk.

The town was in full summer mode, nearly bursting with American flags and tourists enchanted by the cutesy shops and eccentric townspeople. The trees were full and leafy, and the air smelled like some Hallmark-perfect summer mixture of flowers and Kirk's hot dog stand. Jess weaved his way through all of it, parked in front of the diner, and left his keys in the ignition.

The diner was locked, a firm CLOSED sign on the front door with a sticky note that looked like Lorelai's handwriting that read GONE FISHIN' FOR MEDICAL ASSISTANCE.

Jess shook his head, unlocked the door, and quickly went upstairs to the apartment, taking the steps two at a time. If he remembered correctly, Luke kept his insurance card with all the other important documents that he deemed useless in a drawer by the refrigerator. Luke had never taken the whole insurance card thing seriously, a by-product of not needing it for a good fifteen years running.

He dumped the contents of the drawer on the kitchen table, and flipped through the stack of papers. Finally, he found the small laminated insurance card wedged between what looked like the title to his truck and an old Luke's Diner takeout menu. He tucked it in the back pocket of his jeans and hurried back down the stairs.

The hospital wasn't too far away from Stars Hollow, and Jess drove fast once he got out of the small-town tourist nightmare. When he pulled into the parking lot he saw Lorelai's jeep parked haphazardly across two spaces, one of which definitely said reserved for handicapped. Jess rolled his eyes and made a mental note to steal her keys and move her car before she got a ticket, or worse towed.

The woman at the front desk looked up when he entered, and he caught the familiar shift in judgment that was written all over her face. He wasn't looking his best, if he admitted it. He had been on a writing binge when Lorelai called; his clothes were wrinkled, he had heavy bags under his eyes after a couple days without sleep, and he hadn't shaved. He was in full on scruffy artist in black jeans and a Bob Dylan t-shirt mode, and he knew any normal receptionist would think he was up to no damn good.

"Here to see Luke Danes," he said. He tossed the insurance card on the counter. "I guess you needed his insurance card before you started treatment."

"Ah, yes, Mr. Danes," the receptionist took the card gingerly from the top of the counter, "Thank you, I'll put it in the system and let the doctors know."

"Great. Where is he?"

"You're not allowed to see him unless you're family," she said, her eyes on the computer monitor as she typed.

"I'm his nephew."

She paused and warily looked him up and down again. "Name?"

"Jess Mariano. Where's Lorelai Gilmore then? His …girlfriend?"

"We wanted to give her a sedative for hysteria, but apparently my medical recommendations don't have value without the power of the prescription pad," the receptionist said sourly, "she was in here up until a few minutes ago, I have no idea where she ran off to."

"You shouldn't leave her unattended," Jess shook his head.

"Yes, well, at least she isn't in here," the receptionist checked something on a pad of paper by her elbow, "Unfortunately you really can't see Mr. Danes, they're going to bring him in for surgery now."

"Great," Jess ran a hand through his hair. "How long is that going to take?"

"They're going to need to reset the bone, probably insert a screw or two. I'm not sure," she swiveled her chair away from him, "go sit and wait."

Jess pushed off from the counter, irritated. The waiting room was nearly empty save for a nervous looking young man that was flipping through a tattered copy of What to Expect When You're Expecting and an elderly woman that was knitting something that looked suspiciously like a dog sweater. He scanned the signs, and saw an arrow pointing towards the cafeteria.

Unsurprisingly, he found Lorelai by the coffee machine, fighting with a stack of Styrofoam cups that were stuck together and muttering curses. "Goddamn … stupid … give me one, you monsters …"

"Need help?" Jess leaned against the wall, folding his arms.

She spun around, and looked immediately relieved. "Jess, thank god you made it. You got his insurance card?"

"Yeah, they have it, they're taking him in for treatment now," Jess held a hand out for the cups.

She handed the stack to him. He unstuck the top cup by unscrewing it like a jar top, and then popped a second cup off for himself. Lorelai filled them both to the brim with hot, dark coffee, mercilessly draining the machine.

"Thanks Jess," she tossed the still-stuck stack of cups carelessly into the corner and handed him his coffee, "you're a real hero today."

"What happened?" he asked. He held his coffee with both hands.

"It's my fault," Lorelai's eyes became a little teary. She bit her lip, eyebrows drawing together. "I threw Paul Anka's toy and it got up on the roof, so I asked him to grab the ladder and get it – Paul Anka gets very cranky when he loses his toys – and he was already late for the diner and he didn't really have time so he rushed and didn't prop the ladder up right and the gutter – which he's been telling me to get replaced for years – broke under the pressure and Luke, the toy, the gutter, and the ladder all fell onto the ground and he was knocked out for a few minutes and you should have seen his leg, all broken and sticking out funny, and I had to get the ladder off of him and he was bleeding in my car and in so much pain and then we got him here and that damn idiot woman at the front desk and the doctors refused to help him until we got the stupid insurance card. I swear. And I locked the keys to the diner inside the diner and we would have been absolutely screwed without you."

"It's no problem. I was at a friend's apartment in New York anyways, I was only an hour or so away." Jess frowned, "Seems really unlike Luke to not set the ladder up right."

"I know," Lorelai said miserably, "he would have been okay but the gutter was falling apart and he forgot about the cracks in it."

Something still wasn't quite adding up for Jess, but he didn't want to push her. Luke wouldn't have forgotten about the weak gutter unless he had something else on his mind, and Jess knew that being worried about being late for the diner wasn't enough for his uncle to forget about the structural integrity of a building.

Lorelai rummaged through the cabinets and found a giant bag of ground coffee and a stack of coffee grinds. Without hesitating, she dumped the existing grinds into the trash and began fixing a new pot.

"Paul Anka … I have to call Babette, tell her to check on him. Did you re-lock the diner? I don't want Kirk in there."

"It's locked," Jess sipped his coffee, wrinkling his nose at the harsh bitter taste. "Hospital coffee is the worst."

"But at least there is coffee," Lorelai said darkly. She finished the pot and hit brew, distracted. "I have to call Michel too, tell him not to kick everyone out just because I'm gone. And Sookie, she'll be worried…" She paused her train of thought and looked at him, "A friend in New York? Who were you with?"

"Emma has a friend who lives in Astoria, but she's been out of town for a few weeks. Told me I could use the apartment for writing, as a get away." Jess said.

"What, you can't write in Philadelphia?"

"I write better in New York," he said.

It was true, there was something about being in the city, in his old neighborhoods, about finding niches in coffee shops and bars in the dark literary underground of the Village that still reeked of Dylan, Kerouac, and Ginsburg. Jess could write in Philadelphia, at his messy desk above the publishing house or in one of the many bars he frequented as excuses to anesthetize writer's block. But, when he needed to get serious, needed to put words on paper and pen the narrative lurking in the back of his mind, he went back to where he grew up. New York was a writer's paradise, the traffic and the crowds barely camouflaging the throbbing heartbeat of literature and poetry that ached beneath the concrete and steel bones of the city.

"You artists," Lorelai shook her head. "I'm going to make a few calls – when this is finished could you just take the whole pot and meet me in the waiting room?"

"Sure," Jess said, amused.

She disappeared down the hallway, phone in one hand and coffee in the other. Jess waited for the coffee, drumming his fingers on the counter, lost in thought.

He was worried about Luke, certainly, but the broken leg and whatever other physical damage was caused by falling off of a ladder wasn't what was bothering him. Luke would never be that absentminded, not unless something was seriously on his mind.

Jess would hazard a guess that something wasn't quite right between his uncle and Lorelai, but he wouldn't know until he saw Luke. Lorelai was too much of a mystery to him. She had an unnerving way about her that hid the reality of her emotions beneath layers and layers of snark, humor, rambling, and denial. Jess was good at reading complex people, but he didn't have the time or patience to try to unpeel Lorelai Gilmore. Usually, whenever he saw her when he visited Luke, he verbally sparred with her through sarcasm and cultural references and stayed the hell away from anything resembling an honest conversation. They both liked it better that way, keeping their respectful distance through wit and banter.

He knew that she would probably never feel entirely comfortable around him, not after his ill-fated senior year in Stars Hollow and the way his teenaged self had thrown her and her daughter's lives into an uproar. He didn't feel that comfortable around her either, if he was honest with himself. She kept him at an arm's length distance away, warm and bubbly and funny and just a touch removed.

The coffee finished brewing. Jess did as he was asked, grabbed the handle of the pot, and made his way back into the waiting room. The receptionist shot him a look, but he ignored her, set the pot on the table near Lorelai, and sank into a seat a couple spaces over.

He pulled a notebook and pen out of his bag and tried to get back into the torrent of writing he had been in before his phone rang that morning. He read a few pages but his eyes kept re-reading the same lines over and over, his gaze unfocused, catching moments of Lorelai's rapid fire conversations and turning the day over in his mind.

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A few hours later, after Jess was thoroughly sore from sitting in the hard hospital chair, the receptionist finally told them that they could go in to see Luke. Jess hadn't moved except to move Lorelai's car, so his joints were sore and his head was beginning to pound from the fluorescent hospital light. He followed Lorelai – who nearly ran after the nurse – down the hallway and into Luke's room.

Luke looked terrible. He had a large purple lump rising from his right temple, and a gash across his cheekbone. His leg was in a cast and propped up, and he had a variety of tubes running from his arm to an IV machine. He looked at them groggily through one eye.

"Luke!" Lorelai's hands fluttered, unsure where she could touch him that wouldn't hurt, "are you okay? How do you feel? You kept the leg? Interesting choice."

"I'm fine," Luke's voice was raspy, but had his usual gruffness, "leg hurts. Nothing serious."

Lorelai settled for patting his right hand, which looked more or less unbruised. "I am so sorry Luke, and I know Paul Anka is sorry too. I can't believe it broke like that!"

"Well, I was an idiot for not picking a different spot," Luke saw Jess by the door, "hey, what are you doing here? I'm not on my death bed, it's just a broken leg."

"Had to get your insurance card," Jess said. "You look like shit."

"Hey!" Lorelai shot him a look.

The corners of Luke's mouth rose, "Yeah I bet. You sticking around today? Doc says I can go home as soon as the IV bag is done."

"Really? They're not keeping you overnight? You can come home today?" Lorelai seemed relieved, "the woman at the front made it sound like you'd be trapped here for weeks and I would be banned from the property and never see you again."

"I can go home soon," Luke grimaced, "but I'm going to be in this cast for a while. The doctor said I get a wheelchair, can you believe him? I can't run the diner in a wheelchair!"

"Cesar can run the diner," Lorelai said dismissively.

Luke snorted, "Yeah we'll see."

Jess helped fill out Luke's paperwork and stayed out of the way, tucked in a chair in the back of the room, until the doctor came in and finally cleared Luke for release. Jess overheard the pain medicine prescription and raised his eyebrows. Luke was going to be flying high for a good couple days.

It was probably a good idea to hang around for a little while, Jess decided. He trusted Lorelai to keep Luke alive, more or less, but something told him that they needed help right now. While the doctor and Lorelai packaged Luke into the wheelchair, Jess stepped outside and gave Emma a quick call. She didn't pick up, so he left her a short message explaining what had happened and promising to be back in Philly by the next weekend. He wasn't worried; Emma never minded when he disappeared to Connecticut to be with Luke.

Jess drove back to Stars Hollow behind Lorelai's jeep, and helped unload Luke from the jeep and half-carry him up the short steps and into the house. There was no way to get him all the way upstairs to their bedroom, so Lorelai quickly grabbed what looked like every pillow and blanket in the house and made up a makeshift bed on the couch. Jess helped him lay down and carefully propped his uncle's leg up on the armrest.

Paul Anka came up and rested his head on Luke's chest with big, mournful eyes. Jess snorted.

He went into the kitchen and checked the refrigerator. To his partial surprise it was practically empty, with only a few beers and condiments. It wasn't like Luke to have an empty kitchen.

Jess' head was beginning to get a bit full of mental notes to ask his uncle about, but he kept his silence, grabbed his keys, and headed to the grocery store. Maybe it was too much to expect Lorelai to keep them both alive until Luke was mobile again.

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Jess stayed in Stars Hollow for the next handful of days, camping out first in the big armchair in the living room with Luke and then, when he was sure Luke wasn't going to try to get up and do things in the middle of the night, back in the old apartment above the diner. Lorelai had approximately a dozen crises to deal with at the Inn – a kitchen fire, a broken washer, a fired maid – so she was gone for most of the days, a whirlwind of smart business casual attire, snappy tired phone conversations with Michel, and frequent stress eating. Jess watched her hide the poptarts in Rory's old room to avoid causing Luke undue stress. Now that they were out of the hospital, and Jess observed her for a few days, he could begin to see that something was wrong with Lorelai.

Luke quickly became impatient with both the drugs and the couch, and it became a fulltime job for Jess to keep him immobile and medicated. Luke called Cesar roughly every thirty minutes to ask about the diner, and shouted instructions over the phone. "Did you rewire the toaster? Remember, if it's plugged in, you have to temporarily turn off the blender. How are the groceries? Do you need me to go buy eggs? We always run out of eggs. What about coffee? How's the coffee? New pot every hour and a half?"

Jess let him go on for a few minutes before prying the phone away, apologizing to Cesar, and hanging up. Luke would try to stand up, and then quickly collapse backwards, swearing, wincing at the agony of his leg.

"Take your drugs," Jess said, rolling his eyes.

"No, they make me feel woozy," Luke gritted his teeth, trying to put his leg back up on the armrest.

Jess stood up and helped him re-prop his leg. "Take the drugs! Look at you, you're miserable."

"I'm fine!" Luke insisted. But his face was white and when Jess handed him a glass of water and the pills, he took them after only a handful of muttered comments.

Lorelai brought in take out every night. She sat on the floor and leaned on the couch by Luke, turning on marathons of his favorite movies or, even more surprisingly, sports games. Jess ran errands or did the dishes, catching brief observations of them. After two days, he was sure that something was wrong with Lorelai. Her cheerfulness seemed hollow, as if she was prattling jokes and witticisms on autopilot. Luke would reach down and hold her hand, careful and comforting, but she seemed to hardly notice him.

On Thursday night, when the football game was on and Jess was sitting by Luke in the otherwise empty house, he asked about it. "Something up with Lorelai?"

"Huh?" Luke glanced over at him, then refocused on the game. "No, nothing's up, why? Having a bad week at work it sounds like."

"You sure?" Jess was patient. He sipped his beer. "She seems off."

"Off?"

"Yeah, like something's wrong."

"Nothing's wrong," Luke said.

"What was on your mind the other day?"

"On my mind? What day?"

"The day of your accident," Jess said, keeping his voice light. "Why'd you fuck up the ladder? What was on your mind?"

"Nothing was on my mind," Luke said, "I just made a dumb mistake."

"Something was on your mind," Jess countered.

Luke was quiet for a second. "Hey, can I have a beer yet?"

"No, you're not mixing pain meds and alcohol," Jess tipped his beer toward him, "but I get one since I have to deal with you."

Luke shot him a look, exasperated.

"So what was on your mind?" Jess persisted. "I've seen you when you're distracted. You tried to pour dishwashing fluid in a coffee cup and serve it to a customer. You forgot where the menus were. You called Kirk 'Kurt.'"

"I did that one on purpose," Luke disagreed, "it drives him crazy."

"Fair enough," Jess smirked. He waited.

After a few moments, Luke sighed. "Look, Lorelai's just having a rough month. And when she gets stressed she gets a little manic. And you know I want to help her out but I don't know how."

"What's wrong with her?"

"Ah, she had a bad fight with her mom," Luke said, "and she's not doing too well with Rory either. I swear, when those two are fighting, it's like the whole world turns inside out. Mercury in retrograde and all that crap."

"Rory?" Jess raised his eyebrows, "what are they fighting about?"

"Something about the job in New York, I think? I don't ask. It's their business, they'll figure it out. They always do."

Jess nodded, and then returned his attention to the game and allowed the subject to drop. Luke swore when the other team scored, and Jess cracked a smile. If he was lucid enough to pay attention to football, then he was getting better.

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Late that night, after Lorelai came home, kicked off her shoes, and dozed off on the floor by the couch, Jess returned to the apartment above the diner. He sat on his bed, back resting against the headboard, and popped the lid off of another beer. He reached for his beat up messenger bag and pulled out a stuffed manila envelope, his laptop, a notebook, and a pen.

He flipped the envelope over, unhooked it, and pulled out a familiar sheaf of paper. The manuscript itself had been approved by the editor months ago, and was already in the queue for being printed, bound, and distributed to stores in late August. But he kept this old copy with Rory's scribbles on it because something in the delicate, careful way she opened the lines of his writing, fingers and thoughts catching on the strings of plot and prose, made him re-evaluate his artistry and re-align his thoughts for his current project.

She had sent him back the manuscript only a few days after he had seen her at Christmas. It arrived at the publishing house in Truncheon with his name printed in her familiar handwriting. He had been a little surprised at the speed of her edit – had she even read the damn thing or did she think it was bad enough that it should be scrapped entirely? But when he opened the envelope and began flipping through the pages he saw her narrow handwriting on nearly every page, an interwoven web of delicately worded questions, quotes that she rewrote merely because she loved them, individual word suggestions, and the rarest of circled punctuation marks. She underlined phrases that, in her words, were so good that they made her bitter that she had not come up with them first. She unraveled characters, listing out their development in a neat, bullet-pointed way that made unresolved arcs obvious and shoddy consistency apparent. She looped faint question marks by paragraphs that he knew were unclear but hadn't had the motivation to fix anyway, and gave him gentle exclamation marks at the parts that heaved with torrents of emotion and passion.

In Philadelphia, at his disaster of a desk with a half-empty bottle of whiskey, he lost himself in the pages of his own work and the dialogue that existed between his typed letters and the lines of her penned cursive that crisscrossed the pages. The cold December hours passed from late afternoon to early morning, and he found himself, pen in hand, editing alongside her, scribbling answers to her questions, re-writing passages that she questioned, defending one character and destroying the next. When he reached the end – that messy, incomplete, unsatisfying disaster of an ending – he found a near essay of cramped writing. Her writing began to slant, hurried, rushing across the page, bumping into the lines, swelling with the dozens of thoughts that she put on paper about the conclusion of his narrative.

She concluded what was practically a persuasive essay with a neat, simple, rhetorical question. "Isn't there something beautiful in them never finding one another again?"

He read the line once, twice. He poured himself a shot of whiskey. He had fought with these two characters, a drug addicted poet and an alcoholic musician, two artists too self-absorbed to give their love story the attention it deserved, too narcissistic to allow a romance to live, or god forbid, let themselves find happiness. He knew they would not have a happy ending (his characters, he was realizing, never really did), but he was trying too hard to give them any ending, any closure, a brawl in a seedy dive bar at three in the morning, a clipped one-sided phone call, a letter posted from an anonymous mail box, an unexpected meeting years later after they each succumbed to adulthood or suburbia or parenthood or god knows what.

Perhaps this was how they ended. Perhaps they never did end, and that was the soul-crushing, inconclusive, painful beauty of it all.

He set pen to paper and rewrote the ending in an hour. It flowed out of him; his words felt like thorny vines growing in fast-motion to weave together and create an impenetrable hedge, a barrier, a firm end to a story that needed to end and never end all at the same time.

When he was finished two days later with the edit that broke the dam, he spent the money to reprint the manuscript twice, once for his editor and once for Rory. He sent it to her with a note: There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit at a typewriter and bleed, he quoted Hemingway. Thank you for making me bleed. - J

It was only days after he sent it that he realized, with their history, she could misconstrue what he meant by bleeding. But he shrugged it away. She had ripped the prose right out of him, and he was grateful to her for it.

Here, in the apartment of Luke's diner, he let his eyes scan her edits once again, reading through her questions and assumptions, her comments and her quotes. It felt like a familiar conversation with an old friend. He had memorized the words and the sentences, allowing them to motivate him to push further, to demand more of his writing, to elevate his craft.

He set his pen to his notebook and continued his chapter, occasionally glancing back to the cursive words on the typed pages of his old manuscript.

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Finally, when Luke was off his meds and able to begin to hobble about using a pathetic combination of crutches, hopping, and cursing, Jess felt like he could get back to Truncheon and continue working on his book. He restocked the fridge one last time, made sure the ladder was locked in the garage with the key hidden away, and told Luke to call him if he needed anything.

"Thanks a lot Jess," Luke said, "I, you know, I really appreciate you coming here and helping out with the house and Lorelai and everything."

"Anytime," Jess said. He meant it. He picked up his bag. "Don't get up, stay on the couch," he warned, and clapped his uncle on the shoulder. "Cesar is going to call me if you try to come into the diner at all in the next three weeks. You're banned."

Luke rolled his eyes. "Great. Can't even run my own damn business."

"Nope, not until you can walk there," Jess pulled out his wallet and handed Luke his insurance card, "here, almost forgot."

"Thanks," Luke flicked it onto the side table.

Jess gave him one last one-armed hug, and then headed to the door. His car was at the diner still. When he opened the door he saw Lorelai sitting on the stairs, talking on the phone, her head in her hands.

"I think you're making a big, big mistake …. Rory, that's how the world works. We get jobs, we stick it out through the early years, we get promoted, the jobs get better. You have to put in the time …. No …. No, Rory, come on, that's not fair … what are you going to do? How are you going to pay rent? … well if you were my normal, responsible kid I would have, I don't know, assumed you'd gotten another job or something lined up first … no …"

Jess felt stuck, awkward. He opened the screen door and Lorelai glanced back at him. He passed her, heading down the stairs, but she tugged on his jeans and mouthed for him to wait a second.

"Look, Rory, you do what you want to do. It's just hard for me to watch you give up on your potential dream job over a couple months of entry-level work … yeah … well, let me know your plan I guess … of course I want you to be happy – I want the best for you! That's why I don't understand why you're quitting … okay … okay, bye."

She hung up the phone and took a deep breath, her eyes closed, and exhaled. "Sorry about that, Jess."

"Everything okay?"

"Yeah," Lorelai stood up, brushing off the conversation, "listen, it's meant the world to Luke to have you here the last week. Thank you so much. I mean, I can hardly feed myself, let alone Paul Anka and a grown man that won't eat poptarts. You've been a lifesaver."

"No problem, anytime," Jess shrugged, "I still owe him a lot, so consider it partial debt repayment."

Lorelai smiled. She looked tired. "See you around the holidays?"

"Probably," Jess said, "one or the other. I'll let Luke know."

"Great," she stepped backwards and blew him a quick kiss, "bye Jess."

He nodded, and then turned and walked back to the diner, thinking about the phone conversation that he had overheard.

The drive back to Philly was long, as always, and snarled with traffic around New York. Jess listened to some of his favorite old punk bands and let the week sink into him. His thoughts flitted from the notebook in his bag to his uncle to Lorelai sitting on the porch, pleading with her daughter not to quit her job.

He parked on the street. Before he walked inside, he pulled a piece of paper out of his bag and an envelope.

He scrawled his phone number on the paper and added a quick note.

If ever you need whiskey and sympathy. – J

Without hesitating, he wrote her New York address on the envelope and sealed it. He threw his bag over his shoulder, locked his car, and, quickly and casually, slipped the envelope into the post box on the street before heading up the steps to the publishing house.

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Always grateful for reviews - Thank you to everyone who has given me feedback and support for this so far, and thank you to those who read Fall is for Funerals and Vonnegut :)