January. Back to the grindstone. Holiday decorations and party festivities are a thing of the past and business as usual is the order of the day.
It's cold and gray outside, and a June wedding seems a lifetime away.
But a June wedding is precisely the matter under discussion right now. Lorelai is hosting a lunch meeting with Sookie, Anna and Luke to discuss their menu plans. They've brought April along with them; she's sitting in a high chair eating pieces of fruit and Cheerios, and occasionally throwing her sippy cup on the floor, just to make sure they don't all forget she's there.
Their lunches delivered, Lorelai starts working down the list of questions. "OK, let's start with the basics," she says, tapping a pen on her other hand. "Do you want sit-down service or buffet style?"
Anna and Luke offer up simultaneous – and contradictory – responses.
"Buffet," Luke says, while at the same time Anna says: "Sit-down."
She turns to Luke in dismayed surprise. "I thought we had decided this."
"We did decide." Luke nods. "We decided that people don't like being shackled to a table full of other people they didn't choose to sit with in the first place, and being given prearranged portions of food that they may or may not like."
Anna frowns. "But sit-down is just so much more elegant," she protests. "Do you want people to remember this as the wedding where they were free to mill about as they pleased," she rolls her eyes and makes a spinning gesture with her hands, "or the event where their every request was promptly catered to, leaving them with plenty of time to socialize with their neighbors and enjoy the ambiance of their surroundings?"
"Of course it's impossible to enjoy ambiance with a buffet table in the room," Luke says sarcastically.
"Luke…" Anna urges softly. She reaches out to give his hand a squeeze.
Luke sighs in resignation. "Fine," he concedes grudgingly. He turns to April and feeds her some more banana slices.
"You don't need to decide immediately," Lorelai interjects gently. "Why don't you discuss it some more and let me know? We would just need to know by the end of March so we can plan for staff." She makes some notes and gives a nod to Sookie.
Sookie pulls out a pen. "OK, what did you want to do for appetizers?" she asks. "I just made these amazing sausage balls yesterday, you've got to try them."
"Or crab puffs," Lorelai interjects. "Sookie's are unbelievable. She's actually got crabs lining up asking her to puff them."
Luke sets down April's spoon and turns to them. "Do you do fried calamari?"
Anna crinkles her nose. "Ugh, I hate calamari. Always feels like I'm chewing rubber. What if we went a little ethnic and did some spring rolls?"
Sookie bounces in her seat at the thought. "Ooh, and we could do a Thai chicken satay on skewers, and some fish cakes with cucumber sauce, and a tropical fruit salad…" she begins scribbling ideas down.
Luke doesn't look quite so excited at the prospect. "You know, not everybody likes Thai food," he says skeptically. "How about some mozzarella sticks or something like that?"
"Mozzarella sticks? Luke, this isn't a diner," Anna frowns.
Strike three. That's three of his suggestions she's shot down now, and Lorelai can actually see the muscles in Luke's jaw tense as he turns away to offer April some more banana.
Anna leans over to him. "Sorry," she says gently, squeezing his hand again. "That didn't come out right. I just meant that a wedding is a pretty fancy event, and mozzarella sticks don't really seem to fit in with that kind of feel. But if it's important to you we can have them."
"Mm-hm," Luke grunts in reply, and it's amazing how much he manages to convey with those two wordless syllables, with the way he remains turned away, his shoulders squared, his attention on April, who's starting to squirm in her high chair.
The tension is palpable, and entirely one-sided. Having apologized, Anna sips her iced tea, clearly putting the matter behind her.
Time to move on to a neutral subject. "One thing before I forget," Lorelai says. "Will there be any guests on special diets? Vegetarian, kosher, anything like that?"
Luke turns to her. "Yeah, actually, my sister…" he begins.
But Anna cuts him off. "Don't even go there," she says with a wave of her hand.
So much for the neutral subject. Lorelai looks questioningly back and forth between them. "Is it something we can help with?"
Anna rolls her eyes. "Luke's sister just started this ridiculous macrobiotic diet, it basically consists of barley and steamed vegetables. And now she's inflicting it on her kid too. I swear we should start a pool going as to how much weight Jess is going to lose before she caves and lets him eat a hamburger."
Lorelai glances over at Sookie, who looks horrified. "If you could give us some ideas," she offers, cutting Sookie off before she makes public her feelings about vegetarians.
"Don't worry about it," Anna assures them both. "She can't expect people to accommodate her bizarre diet everywhere she goes."
Luke straightens up from picking Cheerios off the floor. "We're paying them enough money to support a small guerrilla army," he disagrees. "They should at least be able to come up with a serving or two of rabbit food for Liz and Jess." April's squirming increases – she's straining against the strap that's holding her buckled into the high chair and it's clear that Luke's patience is also running short.
Still Anna persists. "Luke, This is Liz we're talking about. You know she'll be over and done with this whim of hers long before the wedding." She turns to Lorelai. "This is the same woman who borrowed $10,000 from her father to start a business making plastic wishbones. The business lasted a month, and Liz's boyfriend ended up making off with the money instead. She's a bit…well, flighty would be putting it mildly."
"Anna," Luke growls.
"And Luke gets all protective of her," Anna says, patting his knee affectionately. "Even though he's the one who ends up bailing her out nine times out of ten, especially since their dad died." It's praise, except that it isn't really and Luke's frown indicates he's not taking it as such.
So Lorelai takes a stab. "That's very chivalrous," she observes.
"Just call me Lancelot," Luke comments wryly as he gets to his feet and starts cleaning April's face off. "She's not going to sit here much longer, I'm taking her outside." That's it; he's had enough.
"Wait," Lorelai urges, trying to salvage this. "Do you want me to watch her while you go over things with Sookie?"
Anna shakes her head. "She's actually pretty nervous around strangers." She reaches out a hand to Luke. "Luke, stay. We'll manage."
"You can deal with this on your own," Luke replies flatly. He grabs their coats, picks April up and heads for the door.
"Is everything OK?" Sookie asks, watching him leave.
Anna nods calmly. "He'll be fine," she replies. "Let's keep going."
Sookie seems satisfied; she launches back into menu planning. "OK, now what sort of salads did you have in mind?" she asks. "We could do a regular green salad, but if you wanted something more unique, I've got a bunch of ideas…"
But Lorelai's attention is still on the two vacated seats. "Excuse me for a moment," she says suddenly, getting to her feet. "I just need to check on the flower delivery for the Gallagher wedding this weekend."
Over the years that she's worked at the Inn, Lorelai has assisted with enough weddings that she's noticed a few trends and personality types for brides and grooms. Interestingly, she's come to realize that it's the combination of the two personalities that determines the ease of handling the wedding. The mere existence of a Bridezilla doesn't necessarily spell doom for an affair; not if the groom is, for example, the passive "Yes Ma'am" sort of guy, willing to leave everything up to her.
Anna Nardini is an overachieving bride, to be sure – a professional, meticulous woman who tackles wedding planning like she's managing a corporate initiative. It's a personality type that Lorelai has seen quite a lot of, and it's a type that normally works best with one of two varieties of grooms: either another overachiever – if their tastes mesh – or a disinterested doormat.
Luke may be somewhat disinterested, but he's clearly not a doormat.
As a wedding planner, Lorelai has always regarded her role as that of negotiator, the one who keeps the peace. It's not her job to play relationship coach, to hash out the conflicts between bride and groom. It's sometimes occurred to her that many of the marriages she's helping bring to fruition aren't going to last, but it's not her job to play therapist; it's her role to get them to the altar by hook or by crook. What happens afterwards is up to them.
Only very seldom has it ever occurred to her to rethink that role. Today, though, questions are nagging in the back of her mind.
She tries to tell herself that maybe Anna and Luke are just having a bad day. All couples fight, after all. Or so she's heard – it's not like she has any personal experience in this arena.
Experience or not, she leaves Sookie and Anna to discuss the finer points of vinaigrettes, makes a quick phone call to the florist to ease her conscience and satisfy her pretext, and then grabs her coat and ducks out back of the Inn, where she finds Luke taking a walk with April around the grounds. It's warm for this time of year, but January is still January. They've had no snow so everything is brown; the grass, the bare trees. Still, the chill air is refreshing.
She sidles up to Luke as he's extracting an acorn from his daughter's mouth. "About six more months," she informs him by way of announcing her presence.
He looks up in surprise. "What?"
Lorelai motions towards April. "You've only got about 6 more months of the whole putting-everything-in-their-mouths stage and then it's on to the 'I wanna do it' stage. She'll start insisting on doing everything on her own, trying to help you with stuff, only it'll take you twice as long to get it done if you let her."
Luke gives a grunt in reply and sets April down on her feet. His expression is blank – not angry, frustrated, or even relieved to be outside and away from the scene indoors, and for a sickening moment Lorelai wonders if she'd best keep quiet. But then she remembers the sight of his cold, silent ire and she decides to forge ahead.
Besides, keeping quiet just isn't what she does. "So – wow," she begins. "I thought I was going to have to get you a towel for that bloody tongue of yours."
"What?" he looks up at her with a squinty kind of are-you-insane face.
"Bloody tongue?" she repeats. "From biting it so much?"
Another grunt.
He's not denying it, at least. "It just seems to me like…well, I don't know you that well but it doesn't seem like you to take that from her. You don't strike me as an invertebrate."
He raises a questioning eyebrow at her. Glances over to check on April, who's plopped herself down and is happily pulling up handfuls of grass.
"Invertebrate," she explains. "Sometimes a euphemism for 'spineless." It's blunt, but so is he. She's pretty sure he can take it.
His eyes shoot daggers at her in a flash of cold blue, and then he shuts down. He looks away with a restraint that's obvious in every tensed muscle, every tight breath he draws in. Then he relaxes a bit and gives a shrug, picks up a stone and skips it across the surface of the pond that the warm January weather is obstinately refusing to turn to ice.
What does she have to do to get more than a monosyllable from him? She tries again, this time with a direct question. "I know I'm getting in way over my head by asking this, but why do you let her?"
That does it. In less than a moment, he's in her face in a full rant complete with hands gesticulating wildly. "Why do I let her?" he echoes angrily. "Let's see, why do I let her? Maybe it has something to do with the fact that the one time I brought up the subject of how controlling she is, we ended up breaking up? And maybe because of the fact that she almost didn't even bother to tell me about the pregnancy? She was going to leave me out of it entirely? And when she finally did decide to tell me, she was already seven months along?" He shakes his head and looks away. "I don't know, maybe it's got something to do with that."
Wow. From zero to explosion in two seconds flat. Lorelai frowns. "She told me she didn't think you would've wanted to be involved," she says. Though really – that's hardly something you can just assume about anybody. Seven months? She really waited that long?
He picks up another stone and whips it across the water's surface. "What the hell kind of guy doesn't want to be involved with their kid?" he demands. "She didn't want me involved. She wanted to run the show."
April chooses that moment to take off running down an incline. She loses her balance, tumbles down and erupts into tears. Luke runs over to pick up and comfort his crying daughter. He rubs her bumped knee until she calms down, then puts her down again.
Lorelai slowly catches up, her hands pushed down in her pockets. "You should've been a mailman," she informs him.
The squinty-frown again as he looks up at her. "What?"
"You're in the wrong line of work," she clarifies. "With all that baggage you're carrying around, you'd be a natural." She gives a sigh. "Luke, you need to talk to her. Is this really how you want your marriage to be for the rest of your life?"
"We'll be fine," he assures her. "I'm just blowing off some steam. It's no big deal."
"Luke," she gestures toward him insistently. "You sound more like a soldier going off to war than someone who's about to get married to the love of his life."
His forehead is creased, his eyes are intent and thoughtful; there's clearly a response brewing but before it's fully formed, April runs off again towards the pond. Luke chases after her and manages to hold her back before she discovers just how cold the water is.
Lorelai follows them. April is now throwing handfuls of stones into the water; Luke is busy trying to make sure she doesn't end up drenching herself in the process. Everything about him – his silence, the way his eyes travel up and around and everywhere except to meet hers – indicates he's got something more to say.
So she waits.
Finally he speaks. "She needs a father."
Lorelai frowns. "Are you some sort of mirage that disappears after sundown? Because it looks to me like she has a father."
He nods slowly. "She does now."
Is he really saying what she thinks he's saying? "Are you seriously telling me you're only marrying Anna because of April?"
Luke winces and looks down at the ground. "There are other reasons," he says, his voice wavering doubtfully.
He doesn't even believe what he's saying, and Lorelai can hardly believe what she's hearing. It's 1994 and he thinks that just because he got a girl pregnant he automatically has to marry her?
Then she makes the connection and her stomach does a flip-flop. "Man, you and Christopher both," she observes with more than a little incredulous cynicism. "You'd make quite a pair."
He looks up questioningly. "Who?"
"Christopher. Rory's father."
His eyes narrow. "You're comparing me to him?" he demands.
She nods firmly. "Tweedledum & Tweedledee. Butch & Sundance. Bert & Ernie."
The crease in his forehead deepens, his eyes glare at her, full of blue indignation. "You're comparing me to some guy who walked out on his kid?"
Undaunted, she nods again. "I'm comparing you to some guy who was going to marry me when he found out about the pregnancy, despite the fact that it would've led to a disaster at least 8.7 on the Richter scale." He's rolling his eyes but Lorelai presses on, determined. "And I'm comparing you to some guy who can't seem to see any option other than 'all in' or zero presence. Marriage, or Robert DeNiro in Awakenings."
The ire dissipates, leaving him staring at her, wide-eyed and quizzical.
"There's got to be a third option," she gestures forcefully with a fist. "Luke, you're the only one who really knows how you feel about Anna, but if you don't love her, you're really not doing your daughter any favors by marrying her."
Luke goes after April, who's started pulling flowers out of a flower patch, and does not reply.
tbc
