chapter three
vi.
August brought with it a thick and heavy heat. If there had been any break in the constant sun, Lorelai would have perhaps forgiven the temperature. However, it began dry, cloudless, and ruinous to her hair. There was to be no acceptance of this villainous character.
"Ouch!" she cried as she entered the diner, fanning herself with papers from the Dragonfly. "My flip-flop broke about halfway down the street, and I hop-skip-ran the rest of the way. I looked like Peg-Leg Joe in a three-legged race with an invisible partner."
"I take it the street was hot," Luke said as dryly as the air around them.
"That would be a yes." She shimmied up on a stool and handed him her shoe. "Fix it?"
"Off the counter! People eat here; they don't want your feet in their food."
"Uh, hello. This is not my foot. This is my shoe. Difference!"
While Lorelai was patently exasperated for no reason other than amusement, Luke crammed the toe-strap back into the hole whence it came. Giving an experimental pull to see if it would stay, he found that he had completed the task admirably. Luke handed it back to Lorelai.
"You're welcome."
"You're good," Lorelai said, eyeing her flip-flop. "If I didn't have you, I would have to buy another pair of flip-flops to replace these. You're all ... moneysaving." She leaned over and kissed him. "Okay, it's seven o'clock on a Thursday night. Can't Caesar lock up?"
Before -- he would have said no, that it was a big responsibility owning a business, and he was not about to foist off his responsibilities onto his workers. But that was changed, and it was of her doing. Oh, sure, he grumbled a little, but he was already taking off his apron and walking into the kitchen to talk to his cook as he did so. Before, he had walked her home, necked a little, maybe spent the night, but he would have returned to the diner, knowing that his bed was there if he needed it.
Now he went home. Not just with her -- for, more often than not, Lorelai came in for dinner only once or twice a week, and just as often she had to return to the Dragonfly Inn to take care of some last-minute paperwork that needed to be done. But Lorelai knew that there was something different in coming home with her and coming home to her.
She knew, of course, that part of it had to do with the house. It had taken several sleepless nights for her to realize that it was what she wanted. She had been afraid, at first, of changing her life too drastically: she had lost her daughter for the second time in a year; her parents and she were not on speaking terms again, she was going to marry Luke in no less than a week's time, and she wanted to buy a house?
She'd realized then that the house was a big, tangible symbol of her new life. Her parents' house in Hartford had been her youth; the home that she had bought when Rory was eleven had been her daughter's youth. Now she wanted -- needed -- this new house to make her own with Luke.
Moving into the old Twickham place had brought her closer to the town, also. Lorelai had never felt more a part of Stars Hollow than she did sitting on her front porch with Luke on a hot summer evening. It was almost perfect.
Tonight, it was a leisurely stroll home. They walked, of course, past the kiosk, and Lorelai paused so suddenly in front of it that Luke's steps stuttered, and he nearly tripped.
"Idea," she said, and she went browsing through the display with a determined air.
"Expecting someone?" Patty asked. Lorelai had in her hands two or three infant catalogues, and a magazine on motherhood was tucked under her arm.
To Lorelai, Luke looked alarmed. For half a moment, she considered toying with them both -- however, the absurdity of the situation meant that it could fall quickly out of her control, and pregnancy jokes were never as funny after living through one when you're sixteen.
"Oh, God, no," Lorelai said, brushing Miss Patty's insinuation off with a flick of her hand. "Luke and me? Kids? Right." She gave a grin. "I just want to see if I can find a baby catalogue for Sookie."
The expression on her husband's face fell carefully into something unreadable. Lorelai waved that away as quickly as she had Miss Patty.
"I'm sure she has enough catalogues, Lorelai," Luke said.
"Not for her, silly. I meant that I want to find one so I can go through it and order something for Belle. We got her clothes when she was born, but she's older now. In the three months she's been on this Earth, she's learned how to grab things! It's exciting, and she needs a crib mobile or something."
"Or something," Luke sighed, but he paused and let Lorelai go through the magazine rack. "You just want to see if the new People magazine is out yet."
"It's called a perk."
Behind her, Lorelai heard Luke sigh. She was too wrapped up in staring dreamily at the cover of a general infant catalogue. It was the Sears-Roebuck of the baby rags, and Lorelai was almost certain that she had found one of the greatest loves of her life.
"Boy, what a hunk," Lorelai said. Her husband made tsk noise in the back of his throat. She ignored him, turning to Patty. "When I was pregnant with Rory, all the baby magazines had women on them. Plus, my mother always seemed to buy the ones where the moms all wore sweater sets."
Miss Patty chuckled. "This is the twenty-first century, Lorelai."
"God, I want that picture. Gah. So pretty."
"If you think he's nice, check out page twenty-seven."
"What is it?"
"It's every woman's dream," Miss Patty said with a confidential air.
"I'm buying it, Patty! I'm buying my porn. Now, Luke, turn around so that I don't feel dirty."
vii.
Lorelai wore her Hot August Nights shirt as tribute to the sweat currently pooling in the arch of her lower back. She was drenched -- thankfully not in her own perspiration but in soapy water with which she had been washing her car.
Luke sat in the shade on the porch and watched her with no mild interest.
It was late in the morning on a Sunday -- the perfect day for such an exercise. Lorelai generally took her car in to be washed, but the dry heat had produced an inordinate amount of dust that settled in and frosted her car like powdered sugar atop a cake. The cost and gas it took to use the Hartford station had finally persuaded Lorelai that perhaps the vacuum cleaner sitting in the front closet would do just as well to get the scratchy dust out. Luke had suggested the wet sponge and a package of car wax.
"You are a dictator," she said midway down the car. He raised a brow at her, too languid in the heat to bother with an answer in a more verbal form of communication. She replied, "You dictated what I was to do -- that is, you told me to wash and wax the jeep -- and then you sat back and watched me. Dictator."
"Lorelai, do you want me to help you?"
"No, this is fun," she said. She grabbed the sponge and dipped it into the bucket, wringing it slightly. "It's just so hot."
That gave Lorelai an idea, and she cast a furtive glance over at Luke. He caught it and traded up to a stern look. It seemed to Lorelai as if Luke had a small warehouse of any number of varieties of stern looks. There were the ones used in the diner when her cell phone rang. There was also the look that he gave her as she chattered her way through a movie.
He had a stern look for her chattering through sex, too, but they both knew that the chance of Lorelai ending her career as a commentator was about as strong as that of her giving up her four cups before noon habit.
A smirk crossed her face.
"I really hope you're not thinking of anything obscene right now."
"No..." she said slowly. "It's just --" and she dipped her sponge back into the bucket "-- so hot." Instead of wringing the sponge over the water as she had done previously, Lorelai wrung it out above her head and neck. "Ah ... now that feels nice."
"Geeze, Lorelai, can't you stop that?" he asked, half-amused. "Taylor's already pretending to water his lawn so he can watch you."
She craned her neck in Taylor's direction and saw him standing with a hose in his hands, eyes cast in her direction. She waved, and Taylor managed to spray himself in the face with the hose when returning the gesture. It all reminded her very much of a comedy skit that she had once seen on a weekend television show.
"Maybe he's really watering his lawn," Lorelai said, wringing another sponge of water over her chest.
"He's got a rock garden."
That much was true, and she decided to ignore Taylor for the time being. Even thinking about him was putting a damper on her fun, and she did not want to have her neighbor and husband's arch-nemesis ruining her sex life.
"Come on, Luke!" she cried. "I'm spoofing Cool Hand Luke. That's gotta count for something. The name alone should get a smile out of you."
"Maybe you should be washing it in one of my shirts."
Lorelai chucked the sponge at him, and it landed squarely on his chest. She gave him a look that said, serves you right, and turned back to the Jeep. Now without scrubbing implements, she grabbed the hose and squeezed the nozzle full blast. Water against the shining paint made a rainbow in the sun.
"It's too hot for flannel," she said. "And you never did buy anything checkered."
"You know," Luke said slowly, peering down at the damp spot on his chest, "I think that half the appeal in watching her was how hot the car was."
"Are you implying that my Jeep just doesn't get the same raise out of you?"
"Ah, geez," Luke groaned. "Lorelai!"
"I just dirtied myself without even knowing it!" exclaimed Lorelai. She made a face. "Okay, icky. Can we get back on erotic car fantasies for six hundred?"
"Right there with ya."
Lorelai smiled, and she put down her hose to walk up to him on the porch. Sitting next to him, she nestled her head into his shoulder.
"I love doing this."
"Doing what?" asked Luke, giving her a quizzical look.
"Sitting. Your arm around my waist. Lunch somewhere in the near future. It's nice."
Luke turned to her and kissed her brow, squeezing her just a little more tightly.
When she came out three hours later, she discovered that she had not turned off the water to the hose, nor had she taken the nozzle off. In the beating sun, the water had exploded its vessel, and she knew that their water bill was going to be atrocious.
viii.
"Mom, hey, sit down," and Rory gestured with both hands to the empty chair next to her. "I didn't know you knew about this place. It just opened up."
"Sweetie, there's a reason you know about it," Lorelai said, dropping her bags onto the floor as she settled into the chair. "Three words: intravenous coffee hook-up. That's your mother. Now, to describe you, I would have to add the phrase 'in utero.'"
Actually, three days earlier, Luke had read to her a clipping that Emily had sent them about the opening of this place. Lorelai had wondered over and over again what it would be like if she bumped into her daughter as they were waiting in line for coffee.
"Lane told me that you talked," Rory said.
"Yeah -- I bumped into her last night as the band was crawling home from touring. She looked beat with a stick and hung out to dry."
"That's how she sounded on the phone this morning," agreed Rory. "I'm not entirely sure that she was awake yet."
Lorelai had indeed met Lane the night before, and the young woman's enthusiasm for what she termed 'life on the road' was unrivaled by anyone Lorelai had yet known. Even playing Seventh Day Adventist churches seemed not to have put a damper on the band's rock and roll attitude.
And, Lane had confided happily, she and her mother were on the best terms that they had ever been in their life.
"She told me that it was like having another best friend," Lorelai said. "She said --"
But Lorelai stepped up to the cash register and placed her order, shaking her head free of daydreams. It was no use to pretend that things were the same, no matter if Lane had said that her new relationship with her mother reminded her of the Lorelais'.