Title: Thirty-Two Short Films About Lorelai Gilmore
Author: Allotrope
Disclaimer: If I were Amy Sherman-Palladino, I'd have a better CD collection and look good in hats. But I'm not and I don't, and these characters are obviously not mine.
A/N: Thanks to everyone who's read and/or reviewed, here and at the TWoP Gilmore Girls forum. Feedback makes me happy like Lorelai discovering Turkish coffee. (Now there's a scene...)
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Chapter Three
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Lorelai waits to be found.
She talks her way into a maid's job at the Independence Inn, an employer she chooses for its name -- and because three days into her grand adventure, she's already spent half a birthday's worth of cash on a bus ticket, milk, and a motel room.
She scans the Hartford paper each morning for any mention of runaway Gilmores and flinches slightly whenever she encounters a TV tuned to the local news. Mia must notice, but she doesn't ask questions.
A month passes before Lorelai drafts a short, cryptic note to Christopher on a guest-room postcard. He should know where his daughter is, she tells herself. Six weeks later, a battered airmail envelope arrives at the front desk: Christopher's reply from Phuket, where he's feasting on curries and hiding from Straub, Francine, and Princeton, in that order. "You should come," reads his scrawled postscript. "Thailand rocks."
His words stay with her as she scrubs, vacuums, and polishes her way into winter. When the leaf-peeping season ends, before the waves of Revolutionary War re-enactors begin to arrive, Lorelai again sits down with pen and paper. But what spills out is not what she's planned -- a witty, heavily expurgated recounting of the fall of the House of Gilmore addressed to an American Express office near the Khao San Road.
Instead her pen traces the same words again and again, to the rhythm of whistling little snores from the crib across the room. "We're okay," she writes. "We'll be fine." And they will: Lorelai has plans. The local thrift shop has yielded winter coats for both of them, along with an old eyelet-trimmed top sheet she's hemming into curtains for their rustic studio apartment, nee potting shed. Rory's walking. They've spent four months on their own, and no one has scurvy. (Yet.)
So with shaking hands, she recopies her mantra onto fresh stationery. Then, before she quite realizes what's happening, the words "Merry Christmas" leap from her pen.
Ignoring this obvious instance of demonic possession, Lorelai signs her name and addresses an envelope to Hartford.
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