disclaimers in part one
thank you for your reviews! i wondered if anybody was reading. :-D
Mrs. Kim sees Lorelai from the other side of the street and so crosses in order to intercept her.
"Lorelai."
Lorelai apparently had not noticed her previously, as she rather jumps and makes an odd noise. Very unsettling.
"Mrs. Kim, hi! How are you?"
"I am well, thank you," replies Mrs. Kim courteously. "I was just wanting to express my gratitude to you for your excellent name suggestions. When visiting Lane, I now am able to converse with her girl roommates Brianne and Sarah without having giant caterpillars crawling down my spine in response to my abject horror."
Nodding, Lorelai smiles. Mrs. Kim notices that she either has not brushed all of the tangles out of her hair or has gained some new ones in the course of the day. Almost without thinking, Mrs. Kim smoothes her own hair back, making certain that it is tucked firmly behind each ear.
"That great, Mrs. Kim. I'm that that I could be of help."
Keeping in step with Lorelai, she asks, "Where are you going?"
"Um, I'm just going to have some coffee."
"Ah, yes, coffee, good," Mrs. Kim says, nodding in approval. "I am glad that you do not choose to replay past mistakes by sleeping with Luke before you two are properly settled down, the guests have all departed, and the ink on your marriage certificate is dry. It shows good common sense."
"Ex...cuse me?"
Mrs. Kim nods curtly. "You. And Luke. I know. I find it refreshing. Too many young people are forgetting the old ways and jumping into bed. I thank you for the fine example that you are putting in place for both your daughter and my own."
"...glad to be of help."
Mrs. Kim turns to Lorelai and is about to respond when she encounters an impediment to her course. She backs up and finds that she has walked straight into Miss Patty.
Miss Patty smiles down at a kind of dazed and rather startled-looking Mrs. Kim.
"Why, hello, dear," Miss Patty says. "We must not have seen each other."
"Indeed."
"Well, I'll just be on my way then. Oh, dear, Lorelai, are you headed for Luke's? I'm on my way to the Shoppe myself, I have to talk to Taylor about the shooting stars in the Fourth of July festival. Walk with me?"
Lorelai was dressed nicely in blue slacks and a delightful little white blouse that said all sorts of things about her figure. Miss Patty admired her shoes (low heel, very in this summer for the business woman on the go) and noticed that her bag matched her slacks. Very tasteful of Lorelai!
"Sure thing, Miss Patty. Mrs. Kim, it was nice talking to you."
Mrs. Kim nods smartly once, turning on her heel as she does so, and walks away in a stately manner, while Miss Patty watches admiringly. As the self-appointed town's régiseur, Miss Patty is always watching how people move, especially when a festival is near, even if there is little to no chance of them participating.
"Now that's poise, dear." Miss Patty turns to Lorelai and smiles. "You are looking a little thin, Lorelai. You must keep some meat on your bones, or Luke will take it into his head to find himself another lady."
"I don't think that there is much chance of that happening, Miss Patty. Luke seems to like me pretty well."
Lorelai and Miss Patty have made it to Doose's Market, and they stand in front of it, conversing. Miss Patty nods to some passersby as she replies to Lorelai.
"Oh, you never can tell with the silent type. They always are the most fickle of fellows."
Lorelai snorts. "Yeah, because Luke has been known to have erratic dress patterns. Some days, he wears his baseball cap rotated three point eight nine degrees deasil. Other days, he takes a walk on the wild side and wears it three point nine."
"I'm just trying to be helpful, Lorelai. You could do with a bit of flesh, because there is nothing so enticing on a woman as curves. Gives it that much more 'zay' to sexy, if you understand to what I'm referring You've got the basic layout, now all you need a little embellishment."
They amble their way across the street, and it takes that long for Lorelai to regain her ability to speak. Miss Patty always loves being one to cause her to be at a loss for words; shocking Lorelai is something that she excels at. There is no harm in anything that she says, and everyone knows it. If she just happens to speak her mind with a little more sex than others, well, then that was their problem! But she has no qualms about continuing in her own ways.
"Uh, wow. Thanks, Miss Patty."
"It's no problem, dearie!" she assures Lorelai. "Now, I know that you and Luke have yet to get that far into the relationship, but when you do, don't you think that he would appreciate a little more mama to his hot mama?"
"You know, I will be thinking about that, Miss Patty. You can be certain that this conversation is going to be replayed several times in the following days. I'll be trying to figure out, you see, where I lost control and where you gained the upper hand. I'm thinking it was when I said that I'd walk with you." Lorelai looks up at Miss Patty with no ill feeling in her face. "You are an evil woman."
Miss Patty smiles, pleased.
"Come inside and buy an ice cream, if you can keep yourself out of the diner that long."
Lorelai hooks her arm through Miss Patty's own.
"Let's!"
From the counter, Luke sees Lorelai enter the Shoppe with Miss Patty. He considers pouring her coffee, but she perhaps will come back with a milkshake or other form of drink, and then will not need the coffee. Besides, if she's going to the Shoppe, she's obviously going to get some form of a disgustingly unhealthy foodstuff, and he'd rather not give her another so close in succession.
It only takes minute for Lorelai to exit the Shoppe and head into the diner, ice cream cone in one hand, purse in another. She plops onto a stool at the counter and smiles.
"I've got a treat."
"I see that." Luke jerks his head. "It's dripping down the cone."
Lorelai licks the ice cream cone in such a way that Luke cannot help but be fascinated. She gives a filigree laugh and flicks a smile his way. He blushes, but doesn't let his gaze waver. She breaks eye-contact first, shifting a bit so that her purse is on her lap.
"Rory sent an e-mail," she says, dripping chocolate ice cream all over her white blouse. Masterfully opening her purse with her clean hand and pulling off not getting it filthy, she withdraws a piece of computer paper upon which a long letter has been printed. "You need a computer so that she can e-mail you personally."
He was wiping down the counter, but he makes a grab for the paper after drying his hands on a towel.
"We are not buying me a computer when you have one at your house that does anything needed for the both of us," he says, and Lorelai has already moved the paper out of his reach, so he stands there, arms akimbo, waiting for her to stop teasing him. "Besides which, have you been watching the news lately? Do you keep up with your current events? The government is watching every move that we make --"
"-- because the government thinks that an inn owner and a guy who runs a diner are terrorists --"
"-- and checking everything we do online. People walk down a street in Hartford and are on hundreds of surveillance cameras, cameras just waiting for some dweeb with a badge to spend hours pouring over the photo that they produce. And don't even get me started on the Patriot Act --"
"Okay."
"--which is just a way to make it legal for them to go into my apartment when I'm not there --"
"Are you ever out of this building?"
"-- without my permission, mind you, and snoop around in my underwear drawer."
"I'm not even going to ask what the government wants with your boxers, Luke."
"People hide things in their underwear drawer. It's a known fact."
"Did you use first personal plural?"
"Excuse me?"
Lorelai's erratic conversational manner is still something that Luke is not fully prepared to meet. This strange jump that she has just made from the topic that they'd been discussing is not unusual, but it is confusing to him.
"We. As in, you and I. As in, you and I are not going to buy a computer."
"I don't know anything about computers, Lorelai. Of course I'd take you along."
Luke realizes too late that there is something strangely intimate about the way he says that, so matter-of-factly, because Lorelai looks as if she wants to do a million things as once, beginning and ending with throwing her arms around him and giving him biggest kiss of his life. Instead, she looks up at him from behind her hair and smiles in a teasing way.
"Awww, you said we," she drawls in a too-cutesy voice that almost annoys him but doesn't, and Luke can feel himself turning red. "You get the e-mail."
She produces the paper with a flourish, and he's got it in his hands and is scanning it before she's halfway finishes with her mock ceremony. From over the edge of the paper, he can see that she's pouting just a little bit in jest.
He's about thirty-five seconds into the first paragraph when he stops and has to peer closer at the paper. Finding things to be unchanged, he puts the paper down and gazes at Lorelai sternly.
"Why are there large portions of this letter blacked out with a sharpie?"
Lorelai looks highly affronted. "I'm her mommy."
Luke feels that he look as if he doesn't completely understand what she's talking about, with his eyebrows knit in that way. Lorelai takes the hint.
"There are certain things that you only tell your mother," she explains. "These are things that you would never tell anybody else, no matter how special they are to you. I'm sorry, Luke, but I'm her mommy, and you aren't, so that affords me certain privileges that you can't be given."
"So, basically, you're your own government censorship committee."
"You betcha."
"Well, as long as you're honest about it."
He goes back to the paper, smiling. From what Lorelai's left (which is, admittedly, still a great deal of the letter: Rory had obviously typed it with Luke in mind, especially in the parts where she talked about building architecture), it's clear that Rory is having a very good time indeed. He notices the small but frequent mentions of Mrs. Gilmore and figures that Rory is up to her own brand of carpentry: repairing the relationship between her mother and grandmother.
"She sounds like she's loving it," he comments, handing back the paper. Lorelai waves a hand in front of her, and Luke folds the paper up carefully and puts it in his apron pocket.
"Oh, she is. She's having a blast. She's doing all the things that I wouldn't let her do last summer."
"Museums?"
"And art galleries."
"Ruins."
"Hotels without communal bathrooms."
Luke snorts and puts a large mug in front of her, starting for the pot, but Lorelai shakes her head.
"None for me, thanks," she says. "I'll have water."
Luke spins around, a ballet dancer in a former life. A small amount of liquid from the pot he's holding splashes onto him, but he doesn't pay attention to it, still fixed on Lorelai's last words.
"What?"
Lorelai squirms uncomfortably in her seat, looking at her hands.
"I said," and she speaks deliberately, as though it's rather hard now that she's down to it, "that I'd have some water." Luke stares at her for a few moments longer, and Lorelai adds with a smile that's almost forced, "Please."
Luke looks her in the eye, trying to decide if she's playing a trick, but then walks to the water pitcher and the glasses.
"You," he tells her as he pours the water, "confound me."
to be continued
