CHAPTER FIVE – Go West, Young Woman
She almost passed right by the inn, almost didn't stop, but guilt and the many years of trying to make that particular dream come true had Lorelai swinging through the front doors and promising herself she would only take a minute—just a minute—make her explanations, set things right, and then leave.
And the minute she set foot in the eerily quiet inn, she heard shouting from the kitchen.
"I don't want you to make me something, I want you to tell me how you found out!" Rory's voice, uncharacteristically loud, uncharacteristically angry. She sounded, Lorelai thought with a twinge of heartache, as she had when she'd come home from Patty's studio, indignant and insulted at the idea she'd done something with Dean.
Now she had done something with Dean, and here was that voice again, those two high, feverish spots of color in her cheeks, the one in the middle of her forehead. That voice directed, in all places, at Sookie.
Sookie held a chocolate-covered spoon in one trembling hand, her eyes wide and wet. "Found out what?" she asked tremulously, but the damage was already done. She hadn't meant any harm—she'd just been trying to comfort Rory when the girl had walked in looking tired and completely heartbroken—but of course, as per usual, it had come out all wrong and she'd mentioned Dean, and things had just went downhill from there.
The other members of the kitchen staff had scattered, Lorelai noted with a weird, distant, separate part of her brain, and she wondered how much they'd heard. Now it was just the circle of them—Rory, Sookie, Lorelai, and Luke. This, Lorelai thought, already stepping toward her daughter, this was very nearly a family. It was more or less the family Rory had had for so long.
But now she looked very much alone, and both young and old at the same time, and when she whirled on Lorelai, her eyes bright and accusatory, she looked like a child throwing a tantrum and a woman on the verge of something very big.
"You told them." The three words, rasped in a voice wounded by a night of tears, weren't a question, but a statement, and before Lorelai could answer, Rory was already shaking her head. "For once you couldn't figure out something on your own, couldn't keep it to yourself?" She had depended on her mother for just this one thing, to be the adult just this once.
Lorelai grabbed her daughter's arm, partly to keep her in place and partly to assure herself that this fuming, railing girl was real, was her own. "Rory, calm down. I didn't tell them anything, and I know just as much as you do about how they might have found out. Just... quit with the Linda Blair, we'll go home and figure this out." She shot Luke and Sookie a hard look before looking back at Rory. "Minus the audience."
Rory jerked away, not even bothering to rub the spot on her arm her mother had kept a tight grip on, her brain trying to calculate. How many people knew? How many people were staying in the inn, how many kitchen staff members? How many people would each of them call, and how many beyond that?
Everyone would know.
Everyone probably already did.
"I can't stay here!" she burst out, throwing her hands into the air. The kitchen felt tiny, the inn itself even tinier, and the town of Stars Hollow suddenly felt stifling.
She could feel, now, why Jess had wanted to get out.
"I'm going to Dad's," Rory said in a rush, the inspiration so sudden she barely had time to decipher it in her mind before it was out of her mouth. "I can't believe you told them."
"Rory," Luke started, holding out a hand, torn in two, wanting to help, needing to, but having no idea how.
"Stay out of it, Luke," Lorelai commanded, her eyes on Rory. "You think Christopher's going to be any more helpful?"
"He's at least not going to tell everyone he knows!" Rory burst out, her eyes now filled with tears. "It's so easy for you to judge, isn't it? It's all so easy for you. I don't find guys the way you do, Mom, I'm not the six-month commitment-phobe who knows she can replace the last guy with a new one." She didn't see Luke's face blanch, didn't see his wince, because she was focused on her mother now.
It needed to be just the two of them, so it was just the two of them.
"I don't expect you to understand what it's like to need someone to care about you, because you always have that."
That did what nothing else could: It stunned Lorelai into speechlessness.
"Oh, honey," Sookie said softly, sadly, and no one knew to whom she was speaking.
Finally, when Lorelai did speak, it was faltering, stilted, and she could already see Rory turning to leave. "How are you going to get out there, huh? Thumb a ride? Drive all that way? And what are you going to tell your father when you get out there? Honey, you have to think these things through." And though all those things were true, Lorelai was also desperate, so desperate, for her daughter to stay.
But even pragmatism didn't faze the girl as it usually did.
"Nice implication, Mom," Rory said, her brain whirling, unable to stop on a single thought and follow it through. All she could focus on was hurt, and fear, the fear of everyone knowing what she'd done. Pointed fingers and disappointed whispers.
Failure.
"Since I clearly didn't think everything else through, right?" Rory finished her train of thought faintly.
Lorelai huffed in clear disbelief. "I—I just want you to stay," she said honestly. "You can't leave now."
"You can't stop me," Rory retorted, and felt tired, so tired all over again, as though she hadn't already slept all the night and half the day away.
And that, Lorelai thought, was pragmatic.
She couldn't stop her daughter, and what kind of mother would she be if she tried?
Two days was all it took, two short days, forty-eight hours. Most of those forty-eight hours were spent on the phone, Rory calling Emily, calling Richard, calling Lane, and calling Christopher with vague explanations and half-truths. Calling the airport with rates and information and destination. Studied avoidance of the ringing phone, of any contact with Dean.
And many of those forty-eight hours were spent, on Lorelai's part, begging her daughter to stay, sometimes with words, sometimes with actions, and sometimes with total, uncharacteristic silence.
She understood, now, how her mother could have felt all those years ago. Helplessness all but swamped Lorelai, the complete inability to be of any aid to her daughter. For the first time in her daughter's life, Lorelai did not know what to do for her, with her, or to her.
So she stood forty-eight hours later in the airport, her arms wrapped tightly around her as she watched her daughter shift nervously from one foot to the other, obviously impatient for her flight to be called.
It's not running away, Lorelai insisted to herself, taking in her daughter with wide eyes. Finally, she reached forward and hugged her daughter instead of hugging herself, wondering if a few days were enough for her daughter to have lost so much weight, or if she'd just always been this tiny, this delicate.
Rory did not put her arms around her mother—could not, since Lorelai had trapped Rory's arms tight to her sides—but she turned her face into the crook of her mother's neck with something akin to both relief and grief.
"Tell me I didn't drive you away," Lorelai whispered fiercely into Rory's ear. "Tell me I didn't turn into Emily all over again and suffocate you and judge you and mock your sense of style and force you into leaving to the first place available."
Rory shook her head as best she could, the single motion a negation. No, she'd driven herself away, and she couldn't stay in the same town as Dean until she'd sorted things out. So she shook her head, and as they called her flight, she whispered, "I know you didn't tell them."
Then she was off and running, her carryon caught up in one hand, and Lorelai didn't give a damn who was in the airport or what they thought of her, and she waved her arms above her head and yelled, "I love you, Lorelai Gilmore!"
And as she heard the words echoed back to her from Rory, Rory who looked so much like Christopher, Rory who was even now headed to Christopher, Lorelai smiled and wondered if she could save the cry for back in the Jeep.
She turned, knowing she'd have to hurry if she wanted to spill no tears in the airport, and Lorelai gasped.
And her tears would not wait any longer as Luke stepped forward and pulled her to him, already apologizing in soft, private tones in the loud, public place because he didn't have a handkerchief.