"I'd rather eat glass than talk about this."
— Bethenny Frankel, The Real Housewives of New York City
"I must say," Lorelai said as they climbed out of the taxi, "the whole ferry ride thing seems a lot more appealing when you imagine it in summertime. This felt a little like the Titanic. I thought we were going to have to dodge an iceberg or two."
Rory and Luke made eye contact over the top of the cab. "What?" Lorelai asked suspiciously.
"I bet Rory twenty bucks you'd try to do the whole king-of-the-world thing," Luke confessed.
Lorelai gasped. "I am not Michael Scott."
"That's what I said," Rory agreed. "And, plus, your go-to Titanic reference is 'Draw me like one of your French girls,' not 'I'm the king of the world.'"
Luke carried their bags to the front door as they tramped through the gray slush on the ground. They stopped on the porch, crowded in front of the welcome mat, shivering in the damp cold. Nobody knocked. Lorelai took a deep breath. "So," she said. "New door, same —"
The door flew open. "You're here!" Emily exclaimed. "Come in, come in." She waved them in with her right arm. Her left arm was in a sling.
"Uh, Mom?" Lorelai asked as they stamped the slush off their shoes and removed their coats. "What's with the arm?"
"Oh, it's nothing." She leaned in to hug Rory, who was careful to avoid her left side. Luke kissed her cheek and Emily turned to Lorelai, waiting for a proper greeting, but Lorelai was preoccupied.
"Well, it's not just a fashion statement. If it were, I'd recommend the Mariah Carey edition, the bedazzled one. Clearly you did something to warrant the sling."
Emily sighed. "I dislocated my shoulder."
"What?" Lorelai exclaimed.
"Grandma!" Rory said.
"How?" Luke asked.
"The front walk was slippery. I had a little fall. I'm really fine."
"Why wasn't the front walk shoveled and salted?" Lorelai asked, horrified, envisioning her mother fallen, stuck in a snow-laden box hedge, hypothermia setting in, using her final breath to utter one last sentence from her frozen lips: "Lorelai, this never would've happened if you'd gone to your debutante ball."
"Well, I sent Berta and her family home for the holidays, so it was just me here, and I certainly wasn't going to shovel."
"Why didn't you hire someone? I'm sure some enterprising local kid would've gladly done it for a few bucks," Lorelai pressed.
"Lorelai, I don't want to discuss it any further. Now would you just come in? I have drinks and Brie and spiced nuts waiting in here." She strode into the living room, where a warm fire glowed and soft music played.
"Well, God forbid we keep the Brie waiting," Lorelai moaned, following her.
New Year's Eve was sunny. They tried a morning walk on the beach but quickly abandoned it due to a frigid wind that felt like an icicle repeatedly stabbing their eardrums. Their faces were so numb the only thing they could feel was the mucus running out of their noses. Burying their faces in their scarves, they retreated to the house for the day, Rory writing, Emily and Lorelai bickering and laughing, Luke fixing a leaky bathroom sink and making breakfast for dinner.
"This is so great. Our last meal of the year is breakfast, and our first meal of next year will be breakfast too," Rory pointed out gleefully when they sat down to eat.
"Luke, you poach an egg beautifully," Emily praised him. "It's so hard to find someone who can poach an egg just the way I like it."
Lorelai made a pouty face. "Hey, Mom, don't talk dirty to my husband."
Emily ignored her pointedly. "Rory, how is the book going?"
"It's going well," Rory said, cutting her French toast and dipping it in extra syrup. "I'm a little stuck right now on this one chapter but I'll get through it."
"Well, you're in the right place. Being near the ocean can be very inspiring for a writer. Hemingway wrote A Farewell to Arms in Key West."
"I think that was thanks to the rum, not the beach," Lorelai said, reaching over to nab a piece of bacon from Luke's plate. Luke batted her hand away.
"There's more on the tray right in front of you," he pointed out.
"I know, but I want yours."
He served himself another piece of bacon from the tray and put the first piece on Lorelai's plate.
"Oh!" Emily said. "You won't believe what I read in the Yale alumni newsletter. Guess who's getting married tonight?"
"Who?" Lorelai asked, stabbing the bacon with her fork.
"Logan Huntzberger. Isn't that name a blast from the past? He's marrying Rene Dreyfus' youngest daughter. The wedding is in Paris."
Lorelai dropped the bacon. Rory froze, like she'd just been pushed into the Nantucket Sound. The phone calls. The dozens of phone calls. He hadn't intuitively guessed that she was pregnant. He was trying to tell her he was getting married. He was getting married. Tonight. She finished chewing her bite of French toast to buy time to compose herself. What time was it in Paris?
"He's probably already married," she said. "With the time difference."
"I heard the wedding is at the Palais Garnier. Can you imagine? A winter wedding in Paris." Rory could tell from the envious, dreamy tone of Emily's voice that the bride she was imagining in a fur stole in a gilded room at the Paris opera house was sitting at this table eating breakfast. Her knife shook as she tried to cut another piece of French toast — French toast, she noted, there was a joke in there somewhere — and she set her utensils down. Her hands felt numb and useless, like she'd fallen asleep on them. She looked at Lorelai.
Lorelai's eyes darted back and forth between Emily and Rory. Emily would smell blood in the water if she didn't distract her. "Mom, why on earth do you still read the Yale alumni newsletter?"
"I still like to see what our old friends are up to."
"And what are they up to?"
"Well, more and more of them are showing up in the obituaries," she said darkly.
Rory wasn't listening to any of it. "Will you all excuse me for a minute?" She put down her napkin and walked down the hallway. She could hear Emily asking in a hushed voice if Logan Huntzberger was a sore subject, and oh, if she had known she wouldn't have said a word, but really, why did Rory care after all this time? Was Logan the one that got away, because she'd always thought —
She closed the door to her bedroom, shutting out Emily's voice, and picked up her phone. She rarely checked Instagram, but she knew she followed Finn and Colin. And sure enough, there they were: Finn, Colin, and Robert, dressed to the nines, each with a bottle of champagne in hand, bow ties askew. And in the next photo, Logan, looking happy, and her, in a white dress. It was the first time Rory had ever seen her. She was actual flesh and blood, not just an artificial inconvenience. She had dark eyes and full lips and an elegant chignon and perfect posture. She sparkled.
Rory felt like she was in a bar after last call and they'd just turned the lights on, like a fool who overlooked the sticky floor and peeling paint on the walls when the room was dim, who felt cute and charming until she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror and noticed the mascara under her eyes and the boozy shine on her forehead. Every bit of ugliness that she hadn't let herself see throughout her affair with Logan, illuminated in high definition. She thought she might throw up.
Lorelai opened the door. "Can I come in?"
"Look." Rory handed her the phone. They looked at the picture together.
"She's pretty."
"She's real."
"She always was," Lorelai countered tentatively.
"It never felt that way. I never let it feel that way." Rory swallowed hard.
"How do you feel about it now?"
Rory closed the app and flopped backwards onto the bed. "I feel ready for 2017."
Lorelai flopped down next to her. "It's a new year. A clean slate. This will be the year you finish your book."
They lay there for a few minutes in silence. Lorelai thought about Emily's dislocated shoulder. Rory contemplated her position on the shitty person scale: probably less shitty than most catfishers. Significantly less shitty than Martin Shkreli. Maybe equal to parents who hire someone to write their kids' college essays for them? Worse than people who don't give up their seat on the train for an elderly person, worse than that guy who went on the Bachelor four times. She thought about Odette, and Logan, and the fact that she'd only learned about about the wedding because Emily still read the Yale alumni newsletter. If it weren't for that, she probably would've read about it in the New York Times on Sunday.
And then her mind granted her a blessed escape. Rory sat upright. "I just got an idea."
"Spiking the hot chocolate with Baileys?" Lorelai continued to stare at the ceiling.
Rory opened her laptop. "No, for the book. I've been stuck on this essay I'm writing about Friday night dinners, and I'm trying to capture the absurdity and it's really hard to get right, but that conversation we just had with Grandma at the table…I just thought of a way…"
"Okay, okay, I'll leave you to it. Luke probably needs to be rescued anyway." She stood up.
Rory didn't respond, her eyes fixed on the screen with laser focus as she typed at top speed, the wedding forgotten for the moment. Lorelai backed out of the room, which was quiet except for the rhythm of the tapping keys.
"Should we get Rory?" Luke asked as midnight approached.
"Nah," Lorelai murmured, resting her head on his shoulder. "Let her be. She had one of those lightbulb over the head moments and I don't want to mess with her momentum. I think ringing in the new year with her book is exactly what she wants."
"Nonsense," Emily said from the kitchen, where she was lining up champagne glasses. "Rory can come out for five minutes so that we can toast to 2017."
"Come on, Mom," Lorelai sighed. "What are you going to do? Be like, 'Yo, Rory, Imma let you finish your book but…?'"
Emily looked back at her, expressionless.
"Kanye? Taylor? No?"
Emily opened the refrigerator and took out a bottle of champagne. "Honestly, Lorelai, sometimes I think you make these expressions up just to confuse me. Half the time I understand what Berta is saying better than I understand you." She began picking at the foil, but she struggled without the use of her left hand.
"Mom, let me do that."
"No, thank you. I can do it." She managed to peel off the foil and began removing the cage, but without another hand to steady the bottle, it slid around the countertop as she twisted.
"Mom!" Lorelai said sharply. "If you don't stop you're going to get corked in the eye, and then we're going to be toasting to 2017 in the emergency room." She grabbed the bottle, draped a towel over the top, and finished twisting with a proper pop.
"There," she said, satisfied. "Now, I'll hold each glass and you can pour. Teamwork."
Emily rolled her eyes. "Really, Lorelai, you're acting like I'm an invalid. I am perfectly capable of taking care of myself."
"Mom, you fell on the ice and dislocated your shoulder. You're not perfectly capable of taking care of yourself. You were alone. What if you couldn't get up?"
Luke slunk down on the couch. It was 11:59, but it was probably safer for him to try to blend into the furniture than interrupt.
"That was an accident. A one-time thing." Emily waved it off.
"I just — I'm worried about you, up here so far away from us. If something happened, it would take me six hours of planes, trains, and automobiles to get here. I know you have Berta and the gang but I don't know them, I don't know whether they're doing a good job, and—"
Emily put her hands on her hips. "What, are you afraid I'll go senile and they'll swindle me into writing you out of the will and leaving everything to them instead?"
"Mom." Lorelai gritted her teeth and squeezed the neck of the champagne bottle.
"Maybe I'll take the Leona Helmsley approach and leave it all to that dog of yours."
"You know this has nothing to do with your will." Lorelai meant to set the bottle down the counter, but it was really more of a slam.
Emily picked it up and began to pour into an unsteady glass. Lorelai sighed and reached out to hold it in place. "I resent you patronizing me," Emily said curtly. "Ever since you got here you've been treating me like you're ready to shove me into assisted living to play bingo and eat Jell-O every night."
"Oh, believe me, I am fully aware that I won't be able to put you anywhere unless I can throw you over my shoulder and carry you myself."
"If you're worried about bearing the terrible burden of taking care of me when I am no longer able to do so, which is not now by the way, you can relax. I've already planned for all that. I have the Cadillac of long-term care insurance plans. I will have a live-in nurse."
"Great. Wonderful. Well, you may want to stop paying those premiums because you won't make it to that point if you fall into a snow bank with a broken hip and freeze to death first!"
The clock struck midnight. Through the sliding door, fireworks lit up the sky over the water.
"Happy New Year," Luke mumbled.
The door to Rory's room swung open and she popped her head out. "Happy New Year!" she called down the hall.
Emily and Lorelai glared at each other. Lorelai lifted a glass. "Cheers, Mom," she said, draining it in one gulp.
Next week: Rory entertains unexpected visitors at work; Kirk starts a new business; Lane gets surprising news.
