Chapter X
"You know we have to talk about this, right?"
Lorelai leans against the bedroom door while while she watches Rory type away on her computer at her desk, surprisingly fast for only using one hand. She decides to confront the issue head-on instead of leading up with an anecdote or a joke. She wishes Chris was here, though it's been a mere 24 hours since he left, and that sentiment is messing with her head, weighing her down. He is with Sherry, Lorelai must remind herself almost constantly, and she doesn't have the right to miss him.
Rory stops after a few more words, finishing the sentence in a satisfied flourish of quickly-pressed keys. She swiftly swirls around in her chair, as though the denim on her jeans were fake, replaced by a slippery silk look-alike. She asks, "What do you mean?"
"You know what I mean." Lorelai pushes away from the doorframe and walks in to plop onto the bed. Discussion spot. "We need to talk about the accident. And Dean, and Luke. We have to talk about Jess."
"What more is there to say? I thought you weren't angry with Jess anymore."
Lorelai shakes her head quickly. How many times does she have to say it? And why isn't Chris here to back her up? "I'm not so angry with Jess about the accident. I know what happened wasn't his fault," she reiterates, thinking, But you can't go from anti-Christ to saint in a day. "What I need explained is you visiting him yesterday and today, and apparently every day after school, as you casually told me on your way out the door?"
"I want to visit the hospital after school," Rory re-states helpfully.
"I heard you the first time, but why?"
Rory sighs. "I don't want him to be alone in there. And… I guess I'm scared. I overheard some gossip last night before the movie. Babette and Patty were saying that Luke is sending Jess away. Back to New York."
Though the thought of Jess leaving isn't exactly a cacophony to her ears, Lorelai snorts. Banking one's schedule on the two town gossips is not the smartest move, and Rory is more intelligent than that. "And you believed them? I dropped two oranges outside the market and the next day, Babette gave condolences for my two dozen runaway citrus fruits."
Rory ignores the anecdote. "Mom, what if Jess actually is leaving?"
"Then he can tell you himself. Don't listen to Patty and Babette. And don't bring it up to him. It's his information to share."
"But-"
Lorelai cuts her off with a tilt of her head. "Do you care that much? Rory, I get it, you guys are friends. But how are you friends? It throws me for a loop every time."
"I don't know," Rory admits as she gets up from her chair, getting onto the bed to lay back. She crashes onto the mattress, the reverberations bouncing Lorelai up and down. "I don't know. It just happened. We have stuff in common."
"What, you both like books? Rory, the kid steals and smokes and pulls pranks. What exactly do you have in common?" Though she doesn't want to start this argument again, she can't help it. She needs to figure this out.
Rory groans at the insults, fact-based that they are. "Look, I don't exactly get it either. We have conversations. He keeps up with me, and I keep up with him. Not helping, I know. But he's my friend and I care about him and if he leaves, I'm going to get sad about it, and you're going to let me!"
Lorelai releases a small whistle and mutters, "I'll supply chocolate."
"Thank you!"
She eases onto the next one. "And Dean? Does Dean not keep up with you?"
"Of course Dean keeps up with me. We don't have the same stuff in common, but there is other stuff. Dean is awesome, you know this."
Though she isn't sure exactly what 'keeping up' means, Lorelai doesn't file a request for Rory's dictionary of relationship definitions. She just affirms, "Yes, I love Dean, but what matters is that you love Dean. And lately, I think he's been questioning that, and maybe you are too."
She doesn't just think he's been questioning it. She knows he's been questioning it. When she came home late that night to find Dean on her porch steps, Lorelai wanted to retreat back to her Jeep and drive around aimlessly until he left. She saw his face and knew what he was thinking before she reached him. When he asked her, she didn't deny it because she couldn't, no matter how much she wanted to. When he shifted his gaze to hers, she saw the pain he was in, the anger raging through him, as he dared her with his eyes to say no. She desired to say something, to comfort him, but what could she say? She'd told him Rory wouldn't lie, but now that her daughter had been lying to herself and to him, Dean knew Lorelai wouldn't do the same. So she just stared on in silence, while he slowly lifted himself up from the steps to wander off into the dark, lost even though he knew exactly where he was going.
Just as Lorelai predicts, "What, because of Jess? That's ridiculous."
She sighs and shakes her head. This is ridiculous. Was that even a refusal? "Alright, sweets, I won't argue with you about this. Think about it, though. You and Dean need to treat each other well, and that's all I have to say about it. Next. Luke."
"I know. I have an idea, actually. I'm not sure how you're going to feel about it…" Rory says, stretching her fingertips into the gap between her arm and cast, trying to scratch the isolated skin with her nails. Her mother slaps her hand away.
"This is about the money?" Lorelai asks as her daughter immediately returns her efforts to the itch.
"Yes."
"Good because I'm drawing a blank."
Rory begins, "There's a town meeting tomorrow."
They spend the rest of the evening debating and considering and calculating, with Rory making several drafts of pro-con lists. There is a mass amount of junk food involved, as well as pizza delivery. The mother finds her distraction from the man who walked away, the father of her child. The man who learned to grow up, just not with her. The daughter indulges her attention on the person in whom she invests more of herself with each passing day, forgetting the boy who won her heart before she learned how to listen to it.
"You know we have to talk about this, right?"
Jess shrugs with his eyes cast down on Old Man and the Sea. Luke has just been watching him read for the last half an hour or so, letting himself descend from the peak of triumph he reached when he coaxed out Jess's job confession. He'll occasionally flip the page of his Boating World magazine, but focusing is hard when one is so elated with victorious content. His nephew would set the book down every few minutes, leaning back to shut his eyes, trying to shoo the headache away so he could continue through the story. It is the slowest Luke has ever seen him read anything, and it is hard to watch. Books are the only thing the kid likes, and probably the only thing that keeps him sane. Books and the person with whom he discusses them.
Finally at the bottom of his mountain of satisfaction, Luke proceeds to the next destination and confronts the topic as calmly as he can. "Book, down. Now."
Jess keeps reading, and Luke groans, the patience departing much faster than it arrived. "Really? You're just going to leave me a note 'Bye, I'm going back to New York' and that's that? I almost started packing up all your worthless crap, then thought better of it. You should pack up all your worthless crap, you should call your mother, but before that, you should talk to me about it!"
"Having an aneurysm over there, Uncle Luke?" Jess asks cheekily as he lowers the book to his lap. Luke sees the margins are filled in with scribbled notes and annotations, making a border of ink around the paragraphs.
Luke ignores the unwarranted title and asks, "Is this really what you want?"
"I thought it's what you would want," Jess says with another bump of his shoulder, bringing the book back into view. "Come on. I don't belong here, and I don't want anyone's pity. If I weren't in a hospital bed, don't you think I'd be back in the city by now? Lorelai would've made sure of it."
At the mention of her name, Luke flinches. Suddenly, it hits him harder than the 11 o'clock rush on Sunday. He can hear her voice in his head from two nights ago, yelling at him.
Why did you do this? … If you hadn't brought him here, none of this would've happened.
He stares at the floor, as if holes would appear from the strength of his gaze. Then he would drop himself into one of them, so he could forget his nephew, and Lorelai, and the hospital, and the money. But the Lorelai of two nights ago doesn't stop taunting him.
Everybody hated him. Everybody knew he was trouble but you wouldn't listen and you wouldn't send him home and now my daughter is in the hospital.
An image of Rory flashes through Luke's mind. Jesus, he loves that little girl. She's still so small and innocent in his eyes; she always will be. He imagines her cradling her fractured wrist, hidden from air and daylight in that cast.
But you thought Rory would be good for Jess, never mind what he'd be for her. That wasn't important at all, was it?
Luke adores Rory, and he suspects Jess is starting to as well. Their friendship isn't toxic; he's seen that for himself. Their relationship isn't broken; it's the only bond Jess hasn't severed in this town besides the one with him, try as he might. That's right. Jess isn't the best kid, but Rory has enough character to choose who her friends are. As much as Luke still sees her as a child on a playground, at least he trusts her to pick out her own playmates. And if one of them happens to be his screw-up, sarcastic, stupidly intelligent nephew, then so be it. Just as he is resolving this, post-accident Lorelai fights him one more time. Even though current Lorelai apologized for what she said Friday night, admitted that she'd been wrong, that doesn't mean she hadn't meant it. That doesn't mean it isn't exactly what the rest of Stars Hollow is thinking, what they haven't had the opportunity to say to his face.
You had an obligation to this town and to me and to Rory.
Luke values family; he always has. He doesn't want to turn his back on Jess, but family isn't just about blood. Lorelai told him that he is like family to her, and Luke imagines that if he had a daughter, he'd want her to be something like Rory. Liz left years ago, as soon as she was old enough, and his father is dead. Damn, he misses him. His father loved this town, and he ingrained that passion into his son, no matter how eccentric and deranged the other citizens happen to be. He does have an obligation to them, and he has an obligation to Jess. To protect them from one another. The rest of his blood has left Stars Hollow, or has left this life. Maybe it's for the best if Jess does the same, before the people of Stars Hollow hunt him down, or before his nephew is in a hole even Luke can't drag him out of and figure out how to patch.
"You know we have to talk about this, right?"
Luke paces back and forth behind the counter. "We are talking about it, Liz. I'm giving you a heads-up."
"A heads-up? Come on! You can't just ship him back here!"
Luke returns to the register and starts to recount the one dollar bills in the drawer. Multi-tasking is one of his strong suits, but the anger in his sister's voice is like pouring wine into a simmering sauce, making it all he can focus on as the flames erupt. He fires back, "What, like you shipped him to me five months ago?! At least I'm giving the kid a choice!"
"You call this a choice? You're sending him away because of the accident! Because the town is mad at him! He's your nephew!"
Luke slams the register closed. "He's your son!"
"And I don't know how to be a good mother to him," Liz whimpers, and Luke can hear her take those quick inhales that inflict her when she is about to cry. "I thought you could help him, Luke. Fix… something, I don't know. You've always been able to fix it."
Luke sighs. And he has always been defenseless against his sister's tears, ever since they were children. Disappointing her, not being there for her, being incapable of protecting her - it's a fear of his. "I can't fix this one, Liz. I'm sorry. I tried. I really did."
"You said he was doing better!" She exclaims, and it's true. When Luke called Friday night to explain the accident, Liz froze the conversation for five minutes. She was in shock that Jess, her son Jess, with almost as many suspensions under his belt as years of his life, was studying on a weekend night with a girl who attended private school. Private school, for god's sake.
He sighs and replies, "He was. Is. But Jess doesn't belong here, never has. And the townspeople have wanted him gone for months. Now they have a reason."
Liz chuckles dryly. "I can't believe this. You know the kid is messed up when my saint of a brother is sending him away."
"I'm no saint. Liz… tell me, why did you send Jess away?" Luke can remember it clearly. It was a week or two after Jess's arrival, and he caught him after school to confront him on stealing the bridge money. It resulted in Jess yelling at him, accusing him of taking him away from his home and his friends, with a shove in the lake following suit. If that accusation has ground, then Luke should at least know why.
"Big Brother… you said no questions asked."
"He's not going to be my responsibility anymore. After all the crap I've put up with, after everything he's done since he got here, don't you think I have the right to know why I find myself in that position in the first place?!" Luke's voice sounds harsher than he intended, louder than he meant. It's like playing a song on speaker then suddenly rotating the volume dial to maximum.
"It wasn't just one thing. He'd come home late, he'd never tell me where he was, he'd get into fights at school. And I was dating Harry at the time, fun guy but it didn't work out. He liked to party too much, and he had a weird fascination with tambourines. Anyhow, Harry and Jess didn't like each other. After a really bad fight with Harry, that's when I called you."
"You made him leave New York because he didn't like your boyfriend?"
"Please. Jess never likes any of the guys I'm dating. Yes, some of them weren't right and they didn't treat him well, but others weren't so bad."
"Did it get physical? With any of them?"
Liz hesitates for a moment, and Luke think he hears her inhale reverberating from the interior of a wine glass. "Sure, but it never got out of hand. That last fight is the worst I've seen, and no one ever gets too hurt. Jess has never told me any different."
"Okay, I just don't want him going back somewhere that isn't safe," Luke says, though Liz's answer effectively sowed a pit of doubt in his stomach. There would always be another boyfriend, and cities are stocked with threats in themselves.
"You care enough for that, but you won't keep him in Stars Hollow?" Liz grasps at the rope Luke lowered without intending to.
"I don't have a choice here!"
Liz protests one more time, "But if he could just finish out the school year… When he gets here, he's not going to want to go to school. He could drop out."
"Don't let him drop out. Whatever you do, he has to go to school." Luke won't let all of this be for nothing. His nephew deserves an education, high school at the minimum, but he'd make it in college, in the way that Luke and Liz never could.
"Since when has he ever listened to me?" Liz asks with a small chuckle.
Luke swallows, knowing he may be overstepping, taking on a responsibility that would no longer be his. "Just get him on the phone with me when he gets there. He'll listen to me. And if it comes to it, I'll drive up there myself and drag his limping ass through the front doors."