disclaimers in chapter one
Sookie is just beginning on preparations for the sides for lunch when Lorelai staggers into the kitchen, face drawn and deep shadows under her eyes. Though it is nearly eleven, this is the first time this Saturday morning that she has seen Lorelai, as a problem with the lock in room eight and an exceptionally busy breakfast had made it impossible for the two to get a moment aside.
"Lorelai, you look terrible," Sookie exclaims. "Didn't you get any sleep last night?"
Lorelai stalks over to the chopping board and snatches a baby carrot.
"The cats kept me up all night," she sighs. "They sang their little tunes and did their dirty number until the wee small hours of the morning, by which time it was almost too late for me to catch some sleep. Luckily, bypassing a shower and wearing yesterday's hose, I managed to sleep in an extra half hour, giving me a grand total of ninety minutes of sleep."
Poor Lorelai! Sookie nods in sympathy as her friend tells her story. She has a infant in the house; she understands all too well how it is to have someone's high-pitched squeals keeping one up all night. She's surprised that Lorelai looks as well as she does -- but, then, Sookie amends, Lorelai has had the experience of an all-nighter with Rory, even if it was almost twenty years ago.
Lorelai's taken another carrot and is munching on it with hostility. Sookie thinks that she looks to be the most angry that anyone has ever been when eating something that she has prepared. This is disturbing, because when people are generally tasting something of her concoction, they are happy and pleased-looking and enjoying the food.
Granted, Lorelai is only eating peeled carrots, but Sookie has perfected a technique when peeling. She decides to change the subject.
"How did dinner go with your father?"
Lorelai groans.
"Oh! I'm sorry! We don't have to talk about it if you don't want. We'll talk about something else."
Of course, that means that she really wants to talk about it, and she hopes that Lorelai picks up on that. Then again, even if Lorelai doesn't, she's likely to tell the entire story anyway, and probably use pieces of the lunch as handy puppets.
"If there could be a more discomforting way to begin dinner, my father would kill it, and this would reign as the most discomforting way to begin dinner!"
"That bad, huh?"
"Oh, God, Sookie, I was cranky and tired, and I arrived early, just hoping that we could perhaps get started with dinner quickly."
"Didn't happen?"
"We spent ten minutes making small talk. Small talk! My father is sometimes so clueless that I am not quite sure how he remembered to marry my mother." As Lorelai gesticulates, Sookie clucks in compassion. "Dinner was marginally shorter than usual, and only because I warned my dad that I wasn't feeling well. Of course, to him, cutting dinner short means that there is no after dinner brandy and lecture."
Sookie hands Lorelai the cup of coffee that she has been preparing as a way to distract her from her salad and side preparations, then goes back to her cutting board.
"And to begin it all, as soon as we are seated, he asks about my mother! And this only made me feel ... made me feel ..."
"Impotent?" supplies Sookie helpfully.
"Like -- what? I need Levitra?"
"No, silly!" Sookie giggles. "Like you're unable to fix things between your mother and yourself. Useless in the relationship. That sort of impotent."
Lorelai gapes at Sookie.
"If I hadn't've come in here in a down mood, that would have certainly lowered my hypothetically positive spirits."
Sookie squeals an apology.
"Sorry! Sorry, Lorelai. Okay, from now on, the conversation? It's going to be totally happy. It'll be extremely chipper."
"Chipper," repeats Lorelai doubtfully.
"Chipper!"
Both pause for a moment, gathering good thoughts. Sookie thinks about telling Lorelai about Davy's latest accomplishment -- he did a little dance! and then repeated it, just as if he had remembered it! he is such a clever boy -- but excludes that thought because of the possibilities that it would remind Lorelai of when Rory was a baby. Even with things between Lorelai and Rory back to normal, Sookie doesn't want to invoke the nostalgia for an innocent and sweet Rory by pushing her own adorable and wholesome little one.
As she arranges some celery to her liking, Sookie makes plans to buy more DVD-Rs for the digital camcorder, as she and Jackson have used up their supply of them trying to coax Davy to do his dance a third time.
That reminds her ...
"So, the big night is tonight, huh?" Sookie asks while chopping up the celery. Lorelai by some way sees to facing the sink when she sputters and spits out her drink. "Oh, that is completely unhygienic;" and Sookie scurries over with a rag and disinfectant.
"That is disgusting," Michel adds from the doorway. "I would hope that you would not partake in your animal-like manners inside the kitchen! But that is too much for which to ask."
"Oh, hush, you," and Sookie brandishes her knife, still in her hand, at Michel.
"The big night?" Lorelai asks innocently. "No, no, no, that's next week."
Sookie turns and faces her with both brows raised and a grin on her face. She pushes the handkerchief on her head up slightly with her arm, and her view of Lorelai is obstructed for a moment by the draping sleeves of her shirt.
"Movie night, Lorelai. You couldn't go to Hartford to pick up the new slipcover for the back porch swing because you and Luke were going to stay in all night and have a movie marathon."
"Yes!" adds Michel. "I have to leave my precious children with a dog sitter to do it myself!"
"Oh, right."
Talk about unconvincing. Sookie smells something funny in the kitchen, and it isn't coming from anything that she and her perfect assistants have concocted.
"Lorelai, is there something that you would like to tell me?"
Lorelai manages to look a good deal like innocent without quite reaching it as she gazes as Sookie with her blue eyes large. However, Sookie isn't fooled for an instant, and mentally files away this trick as something to watch out for with Davy.
"Nothing, Sookie."
Michel scoffs. "She and Luke are finally going to make sweaty diner-man love."
"What?" Sookie rushes at Lorelai for a hug, momentarily forgetting the knife that she was holding. Lorelai manages to dodge her, and Sookie regains her senses enough to place carefully the knife on the chopping block. "Oh, Lorelai, that's great news!"
"How did he know?" Lorelai asks in apparent stupor. She tosses a questioning glance at Sookie.
"Don't look at me!" Sookie throws up her hands. "Michel and I don't gossip about your love life!"
"Yes, I have much more important things to do."
"Well, Michel, how did you know that Luke and I hadn't ... uh ... you know ..."
"Made with the midnight tango? Please, Lorelai, you are insulting my intelligence. Your coffee intake has been stable throughout your entire relationship with Luke." Michel's watch beeps. "Now, if you will excuse me, I must call home. If my chows don't hear my voice on the answering machine, they will get lonely and make a protest on the rug."
He departs, and Sookie mutters darkly under her breath about the comeuppance of certain panjandrum individuals who insist on starting a sticky conversation thread, then leave it.
Lorelai rounds in on Sookie like the Wicked Witch of the East being flung from a tornado. Even though, as Sookie knows from her perusal of classic children's literature, the Wicked Witch of the East was never technically in the tornado; the house just fell on her.
"What was he talking about? My coffee? What does my coffee have to do with anything? Do my coffee habits have an indirect relationship with my sex life?"
Sookie doesn't know quite what to answer, so she tentatively answers the last: "Um. Yes?"
"Yes!" Lorelai leans against the wall by the door. "I drink more coffee when I'm having sex?"
Shaking her head, Sookie answers. "Oh, no."
"No?"
Sookie knows the answer to this question; this is easy. "You drink less."
"I drink less coffee? Okay, is that noticeably less? I can understand if I'm drinking more coffee, because, hello, cup in hand twenty-four hours instead of twenty-three, but less?"
"Noticeably!" Sookie agrees. "Extremely."
"Like how?"
"Yeah, well, instead of three cups an hour, you generally cut down to a cup every two hours. It's very obvious, Lorelai."
"Wow."
"Yeah. I've actually thought about it -- it was how I realized that you were sleeping Jason, before you actually telling me, you know! --and I think that you just don't need the coffee when you're having sex. It's very Zen of you. Coffee's just there to tide you over, so to speak, until you find that great sex-for-life person."
"Coffee's my replacement sex?"
Sookie shakes her head energetically, hair falling out of its restraints and right in her eyes without so much as a how-d'ya-do.
"I never said that! I never said that it was your replacement sex!"
"You indicated that it was my replacement sex. The only thing you could have done more to hint at it without actually speaking the words aloud was to make it a puzzle on Wheel of Fortune and have me solve it!"
Oops.
Her cuticles need to be taken care of, and the polish on her right index finger is chipped. Really, though, the pointing-finger on her dominant hand is an obviously overworked digit and always the first casualty in the war of the manicure versus the chef...
"Maybe I indicated, but I didn't come out and say it."
Lorelai very carefully pour out her coffee, then rinses the cup, before placing it with the rest of the dirty dishes to be placed in the dish washer.
"I think the cats know."
Years of close companionship with Lorelai Gilmore have made Sookie a master at following a seemingly unrelated thread in a conversation to the original focus. She is unperturbed when Lorelai makes these mad dashes to the other side of the topic.
"Know what?"
"That we're not sleeping together. Luke and I."
Oh. See!
"Lorelai, the cats do not know!"
"Then why do they mock me with their kitty love all night long?"
"There's probably a female cat in heat whose mother never told her that it wasn't a good idea to sleep with a boy on the first date."
"My life is so strange. I'm not sleeping with Luke, even though plenty of opportunity has presented itself, and my cat is a tramp."
Sookie is tickled at Lorelai's language.
"I thought it wasn't your cat!"
"Sookie! A little priority here!" Lorelai admonishes. "We've been talking about my lack of sex with Luke for the past week, have we not? And you did not think to mention that the staff knew that I wasn't having sex because of my mad coffee drinking?"
Erm.
"I didn't think about it."
"So it's this unconscious thing that you have?"
"Lorelai, we've been working together for how long? Michel and I are very attuned to you. Just as you're very attuned to me ... and Michel."
Sookie's actually a little doubtful on that last one. With Michel, Sookie just has an annoyed and annoying meter. She curries her mood only slightly to his. It isn't at all how she behaves with Lorelai, or Jackson, or especially with Davy. When Davy is upset, Sookie tries to be as upbeat and as mommylovesyou as possible!
Lorelai nods.
"Yeah. Yeah, that sounds right."
There is a loud knock at the outside door. Sookie wipes her hands on her apron, then scurries on over to answer the door. Opening it reveals Kirk standing on the kitchen poor steps with a large basket and a cool glint to his eyes that Sookie knows he only ever gets when selling an idea for a job that he could perform.
"Ladies," Kirk says, jerking his head at each of them after a fashion. "I come to you today with a proposition for your kitchen."
"Then I'll be bowing out, Kirk," Lorelai says form the door. "This is Sookie's kitchen, she makes ... the business decisions."
Sookie swirls around to face Lorelai, glaring. She knows how hard it is for Sookie to say no to Kirk, especially when he's so polite to her! How dare she leave her! Oh!
"Well, then, Sookie," begins Kirk, turning his full and automaton-like attention upon her, "I would like to show you rather than tell you my latest idea. It is a doozie!"
Oh boy, a doozie.
Thumping his basket onto the table, Kirk starts unraveling strings and unsnapping latches on the side.
"Kirk!" Sookie squeaks, horrified eyes cast upon the dirty bundle he was in the process of unwrapping.
Once unearthed from its sooty cloth, the inside of the brown basket is to be seen. Shriveled yellow sticks no bigger than a pen, with wilting green tufts stuck to their tops, are scattered in the first layer. Just below that are gold-tinted white and sickly green-looking balls, four or five connected on a thin vine. Beneath that even, jutting out from the others, are the odd white-yellow and brown lumps.
"I've taken up a greenhouse with Mother in the side yard."
If Sookie thought that hearing Lorelai's plans for having sex with Luke were mildly disturbing (yet endearing), then Kirk's declaration was perturbing to the nth.
"No, no, no, no, no!"
It actually wasn't all that hard saying it after all.
up next: chapter four.
