When the Bough Breaks - Chapter Two
"On a day of burial there is no perspective - for space itself is annihilated. Your dead friend is still a fragmentary being. The day you bury him is a day of chores and crowds, of hands false or true to be shaken, of the immediate cares of mourning. The dead friend will not truly die until tomorrow, when silence is round you again. Then he will show himself complete, as he was - to tear himself away, as he was, from the substantial you. Only then will you cry because of him who is leaving and whom you can't detain.
Rory wakes to the sound of silence only three hours after she'd finally passed out, exhausted from hours of tears that had kept her company. She lay wrapped tightly in the soft sheets from her mother's bed, breathing in the scent that at the same time both comforted her and brought her to an entire new round of tears. Slowly she gets out of bed, it was only six and hours before she got up on any other given day but she couldn't stay in the bed any longer, she had things to do today. Things that needed to be taken care of. She had a sister to take care of now. Businesses to figure out. A life to figure out.
Slowly she moves out of the bed and wanders into the bathroom. She could remember the exact sequence of events when she'd first set foot in the remodeled bathroom. The banter that had always come so easily between she and her mother, even after months of separation. She waited breathlessly with both her mother and Luke in this bathroom when they found out that Lorelai was pregnant again, with Ellie. Moving out of the room she trails downstairs taking in the house that she had grown up in. So much of it hadn't changed, the monkey lamp that her grandmother had hated was still there but despite some of the constants things had changed as well.
Luke moving in had changed some things, one his flannel jackets was still hanging on the coat hanger completely undisturbed. And the kitchen had changed from a room that only held poptarts, coffee and extra shoes to an actual kitchen stocked full of food, although mostly now it contained casseroles that the town had brought over the day before. But Rory knew herself well enough to know that she wouldn't touch them, and Ellie...Ellie was Luke's little girl and Rory wasn't sure if she'd ever seen Ellie eat a meal that her father hadn't prepared.
Ellie, who had chosen to stay the night at Sookie's, for the 8th night in a row, instead of be forced to spend the night at her home. She'd sobbed at the thought of her first night alone in the house, without her parents just upstairs. But Rory had stayed the night alone. Why? She didn't know, maybe hoping that if she spent the night in her mother's bedroom she'd once again feel the connection to her mother that she'd had her entire life.
As tears once again slip down her cheek the doorbell rings and Rory forces herself into the composure that she has shown to the whole outside world. Slowly she makes her way back toward the door, touching Luke's jacket again as she passes and with a shaky breath she pulls open the door.
"Ace," Logan immediately wraps his arms around Rory, pulling her to him tightly, "I'm so sorry. I was out of the country. Unreachable. I would have been here sooner if I'd known."
"Logan," Rory's voice is hoarse, "h-how..."
"Lane called me," Logan states pulling away slightly to gaze into her face. "Or she called my secretary..I got the message yesterday morning and got on a plane as soon as possible. I'm so sorry I couldn't be here."
"Logan," Rory can't help but repeat his name, still locked in the shock of his presence in front of her. She'd gone days completely forgetting that Logan Huntzberger even existed, the very many who had, up until a month and a half ago, been her husband for years.
"Come in," Logan urges her as he leads her inside, "let me make you some coffee."
"No," Rory quickly shakes her head, vaguely aware that she had given up coffee as soon as she found out she was pregnant.
"Okay," Logan continues to lead her to the kitchen, "at least let me get you some water. You look like you're going to collapse." Rory nods faintly and allows herself to be lead, she does feel shaky on her feet and is appreciative of Logan's arm secured around her waist.
"Do you want to talk about it?" Logan asks as he sits opposite Rory at the table in the kitchen.
Rory pushes at the food on the plate in front of her, Logan had heated up one of the many casserole dishes in the fridge. That, like Rory, was the extent of his culinary skills and the six years they had spent married and living in New York City had consisted of a lot of take-out. Rory clears her throat preparing to give the speech that she'd had to repeat more times then she could count, "they'd spent the week in Hawaii and on their way back from the airport they..." Rory clears her throat, "We're, um, hit by a drunk driver. Mom and Luke were killed on impact and the driver of the other car died before they could get her to the hospital."
"Ellie wasn't with them?" Logan questions quickly, he had a sweet spot for his young sister-in-law.
Rory shakes her head, "they were on their second honeymoon."
Logan sighs and Rory knows him well enough to know that he's trying to keep his own emotions in check. "I wish I..."
Rory quickly cuts him off, not wanting to hear the wish knowing it will either contain the words 'knew what to say' or ''d be here'. Neither of which she wanted to hear. "So I'm moving back here. I don't want to take Ellie away from everything she's ever known. And thanks to technology I can do 98 of my work from here, I'll just have to go into the city once a week for meetings."
"Rory..." Logan begins but Rory jumps to her feet as her stomach does a familiar turn and it's an all to typical race to the bathroom. And once again as Rory is faced with heaving into the toilet she can't help but wonder how it's possible to have be sick on such little food. And for the second time in two days as morning sickness rears it's ugly head there is someone there behind her, to pull her hair away from her face and gently rub her back and Logan's actions are so familiar to Rory that they bring her to tears.
Logan slips out of the bathroom one Rory has straightened and flushed the toilet but when she as brushed her teeth she finds him one again the kitchen. Only now he looks pale and the expression on his face is unreadable, which Rory knows from experience is never a good sign. He searches her face for a minute before he finally asks, "why didn't you tell me?"
Rory sinks into the chair she'd vacated so quickly before, exhaustion catching up with her, she takes a sip of her water before opening her mouth. "I just found out. Three weeks ago."
"Three weeks ago is not just found out Rory," Logan states, his face flushing in anger.
"I wanted to wait Logan, until I knew..." Rory drops the sentence not allowing it to go any further. Not allowing them dredge up even more pain, she was in enough of it without pulling up the past.
"I..." Logan trails, "I have to go."
Rory nods in understanding, there were reasons their marriage hadn't worked; and both of their inabilities to stick around when things got hard had been one of the main causes. Once Rory hears the door close behind Logan she slowly makes her way upstairs, leaving the plateful of casserole on the table untouched. Walking past her mother's bedroom she gazes a the bed longingly, wanting nothing more then to just curl back up in bed and sleep away the rest of the day and the day after that. But she knows that's not practical. She has things to take care of today. She had things to figure out. And she couldn't accomplish anything by laying around because as much as she hated it life went on. Sure it had changed drastically, but it went on nonetheless.
Rory lets herself into the front of the diner and she can feel the town's residence eyes on her, she has since she'd stepped foot outside of the house to walk over. She was pretty sure that Babette must have called Miss Patty and alerted her that she was leaving the house because there were entirely to many people on the streets for seven in the morning. Thankfully no one approached her, Rory knew she couldn't handle anymore condolences or offers of cooking or any other kind of help. The residents of Stars Hollow were loving and helpful but Rory knew she handle them just now, so she'd made the walk with her eyes trained on the ground avoiding eye contact with everyone.
Once she's made it into the diner she takes a deep breath. Somehow she'd expected it to smell differently. But the scent of fries and coffee were still mixed in the air clinging to everything. And the tables all looked the same as they had from the first day that Rory had walked into the diner when she was just a kid. Luke's hadn't ever changed. Through everything Rory had been through in her life she'd always been able to count on the fact that Luke's would be exactly the same. Slowly she settles into the chair that had always been hers, at the table her mother had claimed over two decades before and lifting a menu she flips open the cover and carefully traces the L+L 4 evr that Lorelai had etched there. It was a game Luke and Lorelai were constantly playing, just as Lorelai would reach the last menu to scratch the words into Luke would order a whole new batch of menus. They would banter back and forth and the whole process would start over again.
Rory rests her forehead on the cool metal of the table as tears slide down her cheeks, she still wasn't sure how she was supposed to do this. She wasn't sure what she was supposed to do with the diner, because even though it looked exactly the same it never was going to be the same again. Not without Luke and his backwards baseball cap behind the counter serving coffee barking out warnings about how many years the food they consumed would take off their lives.
Luke and Lorelai had revised their wills only a year ago and they'd filled her in on what was going into it. Control of both of their businesses and of Ellie would go to Rory; there was no question of that. Rory knew she didn't have to worry about the inn, Sookie and Michel would be able to run it on their own but the diner was another matter altogether. And even beyond the business side of things Rory couldn't imagine the diner without Luke behind the counter.
Footsteps over her head immediately causes Rory's heart to pound but before she can do anything to protect herself the steps hit top of the stairs. On instinct Rory grabs the closest thing to her and holds the bundle of silverware wrapped in a napkin up like a baseball bat.
"Jesus, Rory!" Jess looks as startled to see Rory as she is to see him.
"Jess!" Rory snaps dropping her arms to her side as the adrenaline in her veins slows down.
"Rory," Jess deflates, he looks tired, worn and too old for his 32-years.
Rory quickly crosses the distance between the two of them and before she can get a handle on her emotions she reaches up and smacks Jess hard across the face, "asshole."
A.N. Thank you all for your reviews! I was more then a little stunned when I woke up the next morning to see my inbox flooded. It was encouraging and really spurred on this chapter. I've got the next chapter all planned out but I've got to get packing because my vacation officially ends tomorrow when I board the plane to go home . But I'll have the next update up as soon as I can get it out!