Part 3.

Oh I love you, girl
Oh I love you.

"Such a beautiful voice," Rory sighed as she stared admiringly at the television.

"Such ugly hair," Lorelai added, matter-of-factly.

"But you know, I've often wondered if his hair is the secret to his talent. Like that guy whose strength was in his hair. And maybe if you shave Garfunkel's hair he sounds like…"

"His name," Lorelai completed.

"Why can't you just appreciate the fact that he has a beautiful voice?"

"Well, if his hair is responsible for it, I think I'd rather do without the voice."

"It's bothering me now," Rory pondered.

"The voice?"

"No, the hair."

"It's just bothering you now?"

"No, I can't remember who was the guy with the hair and the strength."
"They so seldom go together."

"You know what I mean. The story. I think his girlfriend shaves his head and he loses his strength."

"I don't know but I like the girlfriend. Oh wait, I think I remember. Swanson."

"No. That was dinner."

"That's right."

The two remained silent in thought. Indeed, the memory is one of the most complex faculties of the human constitution. It must cause us to doubt whether we are masters even of our own selves. Memories are most abundant when we are trying to forget. But try to conjure a single memory when you are trying to remember.

"Why do I keep thinking it's Swanson?" Lorelai reiterated.

"No. Simpson."

"That's Homer."

Rory nodded and sloped back on the couch. Suddenly, she sat forward again in triumph.

"Samson. That's it!"

"Yeah, that's right," Lorelai congratulated. "So where's that story from?"

"Yeah, I can't remember."

"Shakespeare?"

"Hm. No, I don't think so."

"Maybe it was Homer."

"Maybe."

These evenings of silly ruminations were the stuff of their mother-daughter memories. And they knew already that with them it would always be like this. Yes, Rory would move out on her own. They would both branch out in different directions, but their roots were in each other. They would watch late shows together over the phone. They would refresh each others memories with text messages. They would perpetually disagree about Art Garfunkel…well, maybe there was still hope for Lorelai. But what they already were, they would generally still be. And it was perhaps in this where they each found the strength to face the future.

Epilogue.

It was a particularly warm day in June some time in a future that in the grand scheme of things is never very distant. It was also humid. Particularly humid. Humid to the point that it was raining. With a newspaper roofed over her head, Rory ran into a roadside diner. It was rather a working man's oasis, populated with flannel-clad men with callused hands and greasy hair, a simple and polite, if rather indifferent, crowd. They greeted the new arrival with wan smiles.

"Is it raining out?" one asked obliviously.

"Seems like it," Rory laughed, carefully discarding the drenched newspaper.

"What'll it be, young lady," a burly but genial man asked from the counter.

"Just a coffee, please."

The man nodded, and Rory looked for a place to sit. There were many empty tables, but none were cleared.

"Sorry about the tables. The boy's on his break. He should be around shortly. Have a seat."

Rory sat obediently at the nearest table and stared at half-eaten sandwich, the unfinished drink, and the collection of empty hot sauce packets in the carton of remaining hot-sauce smothered fries left on the table without a tip. She could understand why "the boy" would need a break but she couldn't understand what pressing occupation kept the man at the counter from clearing the tables. It is always hard for young Attic women to understand the importance in which Spartan men hold critical discussion of the various weekend combats of the AFC and NFC teams. Chucking it to Gray's Mars and Venus, she pulled out a book and began reading.

"A coffee over there when you get a chance," she heard the man say. She imagined "the boy" had returned and was about to take issue with "when you get a chance."

"I'm still on break," "the boy" said in a very familiar voice.

Rory's breath caught in her throat and she was afraid to look up. Had she looked up, however, she would have noticed that Jess, a.k.a. the boy, his eyes just landing on "over there," was equally staggered and afraid she would look up. But she had seen this day, and although her success in predicting the future was thus far questionable, she was determined to play it out the way she had imagined it.

She looked up. Seeing him made it even harder to force a casual smile. She imagined that she must have instead looked to him like a stroke victim. She was parting her lips to say something, perhaps "hi" (she really did feel like a stroke victim) when he came up to the table and sat. She did not know quite what to make of this gesture until she watched him grab the half sandwich and eat it. So he was the non-tipper.

"You wouldn't like the coffee here. Don't waste your money. There's a place ¼ mile down that has pretty decent coffee," he said through a swallowing of sandwich.

"Uh, okay. Thanks," Rory said, putting her book in her purse and standing up to leave.

Jess sighed, almost inaudibly.

"You don't have to go now."

"No, I do. I really want coffee," she said, repressing annoyance.

"You could wait until it lets up out there. Have a donut."

"I don't know. How are those here?" she muttered, the repressing over.

"Not much better than the coffee. But it's on the house."

She hated his charm most vehemently at that moment because she found herself slowly sitting back down. He now got up and fetched her donut.

Laying the rubber tire of a donut before her, he asked, "So how have you been?"

"Good. You?" she said, looking curiously at the donut.

"Good."

They both looked at the donut now as though it were the only point of connection between them.

"It's been a long time," Rory said, quite irrelevantly.

Jess nodded. "What brings you around here?"

"Work," she said, trying to recover the script.

"On your way to cover the bombing of Hackensack?"

She smiled mournfully as she had to recognize the fact that Jess didn't know the script.

"No, there was a change in plans. I'm going to Princeton to do a lecture. I decided I could as easily change the world being over a desk instead of under it."

"I bet you could."

"So what about you?" Yes, she wanted to bite back the question as soon as it came out.

"Different diner. No Luke."

"Looks like there's a bunch of Lukes here."

Jess laughed lightly. "Yeah, I guess."

It was the laugh that rubbed her the wrong way. He had no right to laugh. This should not have been fun for him. Why could she not be calm and casual and charming? Why couldn't she laugh? She was over him. She hadn't thought of him since that night. Why did he still have this effect on her? Why couldn't he just keep to the damn script?

He sensed he had done something wrong. She would be on the defensive, leaving him with the offensive. He reached over the table and grabbed her book. She was surprised and began to hope maybe the script could be rescued. Only she had messed up this time. It was Proust.

"I remember you reading this before. Just finishing?" he rather joked.

"No, I've read it a dozen times. Well, twice, but it feels like a dozen."

"I can imagine," Jess said, thumbing through the many pages.

"I'm using it for my lecture," she could not lapse into the casual silence of the script. "It's a really interesting experiment on time, memory, character, and perspective, and raises, I think, some interesting questions to ideas of fatalism, man's agency, change," Rory spewed off from her memory of her lecture notes. She suddenly got nervous when he looked up from the book and at her. "Well, yeah, it's about life and time and my lecture is about life in our times so I thought it would be relevant."

"Sounds like you know what you're talking about."

"Well, good, 'cause that's the illusion I'm going for."

"I think Amis wrote the best thing on time. 'And meanwhile time goes about its immemorial work of making everyone look and feel like shit.'"

Not Visiting Mrs. Nabokov specifically, but close enough.

"You, however, are immune, I guess," Jess added.

This time she would refuse the charm. "Nothing is immune to time."

They found themselves again in awkward silence. Jess reached for his drink, but either his eyes were still on the donut or elsewhere, and he knocked over the glass, a small puddle of soda set free on the table.

"I'm sorry," he said. But there was something about the intensity of his eyes on Rory, the deep earnestness of his tone, the blunt humility of his expression that left her with the impression that he could not be apologizing about the soft drink.

"Um, it's okay," she muttered softly. "I'd better go."

Jess nodded and cleaned the spillage with a napkin. She took her book and started for the door.

Turning back toward Jess, she said, "Good seeing you again."

"Yeah, same here."

And with that she left. She was the one to leave him. He finally let her. The ball was in her court. Still she could not say good-bye. She wondered how many times would they have to leave each other before they'd finally say good-bye, how long before that future she once imagined would be past. She hadn't thought about him in years, but she realized then that he had always been on her mind. The memory would not let go. She remembered her that night. She remembered how the words first struck her, how the moment froze everything except him as he went to his car and left. She thought about how brokenhearted she should have been that night. And it was only through the memory now that she realized she was.

He wasn't just one in a catalogue. He was the one. The one to love always, to leave always, and to meet again. It seemed their fate to cross paths for all too everlasting moments.