"There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says 'Morning, boys. How's the water?' And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, 'What the hell is water?'" — David Foster Wallace, This Is Water


Rory swung by Luke's bright and early on the first day of February. She had a long to-do list, and with a heavy dose of caffeine and the bright winter sun finally shining after days of gray gloom, she was ready to knock it out. She had to edit a story about Gypsy's new electric vehicle charging station, she wanted to launch the website before the Firelight Festival, and she was in the middle of writing a climactic scene about Chilton that she needed to finish.

"Coffee to go, please," she told Luke, resting her laptop bag on the counter.

"I'm going to make you a fresh pot. No stale coffee for you," he said, like he did every morning. He dumped out the pot, poured new grounds into the machine, and turned it on. Rory flipped through the Washington Post while she waited. She wouldn't have time to read the newspaper for the rest of the day, so she needed to get through the front page at minimum.

From the corner of her eye she noticed Kirk seated on the stool next to her, looking in her direction.

"Something I can do for you, Kirk?" She didn't lift her eyes from the page.

"You looked like you were really engrossed in your paper. I didn't want to interrupt. I figured I'd wait until you turned the page. Are you turning the page?"

"Not turning the page yet." She tried to keep reading, but his stare was distracting. She put her paper down in grudging defeat. "Fine, go ahead."

"I heard you're accepting advertisements for the Stars Hollow Gazette website. I'd like to place an ad."

She sat up straighter. "That's great. But what for? Nothing that constitutes trademark infringement, please."

"I'm opening a cat cafe. It's a home business. The cafe will be at my house. I've been looking for a job where I can work from home and set my own schedule, now that Lulu's pregnant."

Rory ignored the stabbing sensation in her stomach. She already knew; Lorelai had heard the news the day before and given her fair warning. Lulu was fifteen weeks along. Rory should've been nineteen weeks. At nineteen weeks the baby would've been the size of a mango. "I heard. Congratulations."

"Thanks. I applied to sell LulaRoe but they turned me down, so I came up with this idea."

She tried very hard to block the vision of Kirk in whimsically-printed leggings from her brain. "So people are going to come to your house and buy coffee and tea and cuddle with cats in your living room?"

"Well, I don't have a permit to sell food or beverages. So it's going to be more of a bring-your-own type of establishment. And I don't have any cats, so it'll just be Petal."

"So people will pay money to bring their own drinks and snacks to your house to pet your pig?"

"That's correct."

"And this business is called…"

"Kirk's Cat Cafe," he said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.

She stared at him. "Right. Of course. Well, email me your ad copy and I'll send you the rates."


Rory was reviewing the proposed layout of the new Stars Hollow Gazette website when the phone rang. She glanced up. Charlie was in the bathroom for the fourth time that morning; he'd tried to explain, but she'd cut him off at the word "prostate." Esther was doing something that vaguely resembled opening the mail.

"Esther, if they remade 2001: A Space Odyssey with sloths instead of people, the credits would be rolling and that envelope still wouldn't be open yet," Rory said, exasperated. She picked up the phone herself.

"Rory, good." It was Taylor. "Principal Merton just called me. Mrs. Peterson, the twelfth-grade English teacher, had a bit of a nervous breakdown. Apparently she taught The Awakening one time too many and tried to reenact the ending in the reservoir yesterday."

"Oh, dear."

"Oh, she's fine. If she'd taught Virginia Woolf instead it could've gone worse. Anyway, they have a substitute, but Mrs. Peterson's lesson plans were lacking and — well, I suggested that they send the class over to see you today."

"Me? Why?"

"Well, it is an English class. I thought you could tell them about the paper, what goes into an issue of the Gazette, maybe share some of your stories from the good old days at your previous jobs."

"Hey, my good old days haven't happened yet. And I'm really busy, Taylor, I don't think—"

"I'll make a note in your file for your performance review," he offered.

She looked at the laptop, where the website layout was waiting for her. Her credit card bill would arrive tomorrow. "Fine. Send them in."


"So I write and edit from here, and Charlie handles subscriptions, and Esther — is also here," Rory explained to the crowd of Stars Hollow High seniors crammed into the office.

"You write all the articles?"

"Not all. But most of them. We don't have a big budget."

"And you use that computer?" They looked at the dinosaur she'd dumped in the back of the room.

"Ah, usually not. It's… vintage. I mostly use my laptop." She crossed her legs, then uncrossed them, then crossed them again. The whole operation likely looked like a joke to them. The dusty old office, the Metamucil on Charlie's desk. And if they thought the paper was a joke, they probably thought she was part of the joke.

"What's the biggest article you've written for the Gazette?"

"Well," she began. "A few weeks ago we published a story about a member of the Shade Tree Committee who took a bribe. Somebody wanted an oak instead of an elm and greased a palm. It got very ugly. He had to resign. I mean, it wasn't the Pentagon Papers, but for Stars Hollow —"

"What are the Pentagon Papers?" someone asked. They were looking at her blankly.

"What are the Pentagon Papers?" she repeated in disbelief. She let the question hang for a moment, expecting one of the other students to answer, but no one did. She went on: "Daniel Ellsberg, The New York Times, Vietnam? The White House Plumbers? Nobody knows what I'm talking about?"

Silence. She slumped back in her chair. This was going to be a long hour if they just stared at their shoes the whole time.

"Have you heard of Woodward and Bernstein? Seymour Hersh? Has anyone seen Spotlight? It won an Academy Award last year. Nothing?"

Crickets. "So, what are the Pentagon Papers?" someone finally asked.

Miracle of miracles, they wanted to know. At least one of them did. And, really, they needed to know. It was practically her civic duty to tell them. She stood up and walked around to the front of her desk. Where to begin? "Okay, so the Department of Defense did a study — actually, let me back up, I should start with Ellsberg — how much time do you guys have? We can order food if you want to stay through lunch."


Rory finished her day with an email to her web designer, trying to butter him up. She would lay the groundwork now, leaving a trail of flattery as breadcrumbs, along with some woe-is-me tales of the challenges of the scrappy small town newspaper, so that in a few days she could swoop back in and ask for a discount. She chewed the top of her pen as she contemplated her word choice. It had to be subtle.

Her phone buzzed; it was Lane, asking her to stop by the shop.

When she finished her email, she grabbed her bag, turned off the lights, and headed over to Kim's Antiques. She walked in and nearly ran into Mrs. Kim leading a pack of men and women in slacks and blazers around the shop. It was a little late for such a big group to be antiquing, wasn't it?

"Hi, Mrs. Kim," she said brightly.

"Hello, Rory," she said in a clipped voice. "Lane is in the kitchen." She turned back to the group. "Please excuse the interruption," she said. "Now if you'll follow me into to the other room, you'll see the charming detail. All original. Some say it was designed by McKim, Mead and White."

Rory skirted the clusters of tables and chairs and cabinets, turned the corner at the table of vases, and entered the kitchen. Lane was sitting at the table. "What is going on here?" Rory whispered.

"Hey, Rory," Lane said faintly. Her face was empty, as if her head was closed for business and her thoughts were were somewhere else.

"Is everything okay?"

Lane furrowed her brow, considering the question. "Yeah?" she finally said.

"That didn't sound very confident. Who are all those people out there?"

Lane looked up at her. "Momma's selling the shop," she said. "She's moving to a smaller place on Peach."

Rory sank into the chair opposite Lane. "What? Why?"

"She said that now that the boys are older and she and my dad have enough money saved… they want to spend more time volunteering at church. Go back to Korea for awhile every year. She's been getting homesick ever since my grandmother passed away."

Rory tried to imagine being homesick for a place you haven't lived in thirty years. It seemed crazy. But it wasn't crazy at all, really, was it? The place where you grow up, where you experience all your firsts, where you become the first and second and third versions of yourself, it sticks to your bones. She'd once read in National Geographic that if you move halfway across the world and never go back, scientists can analyze the lead in your teeth and pinpoint where you came from. You can't shake it. Her own teeth probably contained plenty of Founder's Day punch and Luke's coffee.

"That's going to be a big change," Rory said, struggling to imagine it.

"What am I going to do? I help out here almost every day. And I can't remember the last time my mom spent more than three days away from Stars Hollow." She lowered her voice. "I'm going to miss her. What is wrong with me?"

"Oh, of course you're going to miss her. But maybe it'll be a good thing. Zach will get a break from her arguing with him about feeding the boys chicken fingers, right?"

"Yeah," Lane admitted. "That'll be a good thing."

"A little distance can be healthy," Rory said, thinking about Lorelai's new habit of coming into her room every night to recap the day. It started out as five minutes but had gradually increased to twenty. Rory didn't mind it a few days a week, but did it really need to happen every night? There was only so much to say about the paper and the book and the inn. Sometimes she just wanted to go to bed early or read a book by herself. But as a non-rent-paying resident of the house, she didn't protest.

Lane raised her fingers to her temples. "We're going to need to find a real babysitter. How do I find a teenager that charges a reasonable rate, doesn't spend the entire night on Snapchat, and listens to decent music?"

"You might have to settle for two of the three."

"We hired a girl from the high school when Mama was sick last month and she was great, except when we came home she was playing 'Body Like a Back Road.' In front of my children."

Rory wrinkled her nose. "Good God."

"I let them stay up late and listen to Johnny Cash to try to undo the damage, but when I came back in the room they were playing Luke Bryan. I mean, 'Country girl, shake it for me?' I almost puked." Lane buried her head in her hands and groaned. "This is so weird. I'm feeling... I don't know. What am I feeling?"

"You're feeling like a person who's about to go through a big change. I think it's normal."

"I guess."

"And don't worry about Steve and Kwan. A little foray into the bro-country genre will be like their Rumspringa. They'll come home to the good stuff in the end."


After the website officially launched with Taylor flipping a big fake red switch at the Firelight Festival to make it go live, Rory took a couple of well-earned days off, crashing with Paris in the city. She spent the morning at the New Museum checking out the Raymond Pettibon exhibit and then headed to midtown to hit up MoMA for the afternoon before meeting up with Paris for dinner. The next day when she was inevitably burned out on arts and culture she could engage in some vapid consumerism at Century 21.

In between museums she grabbed a sandwich at a little hole in the wall near Rockefeller Center. As she smeared mustard on her rye bread, worn Joan Didion paperback in front of her, she caught a glimpse of familiar strawberry blonde hair and thick glasses.

"Glenn!" she called out. The last time she'd seen him was at a Yale Daily News alumni event six or seven years ago, but he was a prolific Facebook user. She knew he had a calico cat, recently spent a weekend in New Orleans, and ate meatloaf for dinner last week.

His head swiveled toward her. "Hey, Rory," he said, plopping down in the chair opposite her. "Have you joined the Manhattan rat race?"

"Nope, just here for the day. Are you still working at Marvel?"

He nodded. "My office is right down the block."

"So how is the comic book world? Your job sounds so cool."

"Oh, you know. Finish an issue, wonder if it's going to be the failure that kills my career, repeat." Rory had figured that the pile of Harvey and Eisner Awards sitting on his desk would've given him some comfort but apparently not. Some people are always waiting for the world to end.

"So you love it," she said.

"What about you? I saw your New Yorker piece last year."

She nodded. "Yeah, I'm… trying out local journalism right now. And I'm writing a book."

"Aren't we all," he said bitterly.

"Excuse me?"

"I just mean — everyone I know has a book draft in a drawer somewhere. I didn't get anywhere with mine." Her face probably fell like Glenn's cat had fallen off the windowsill last month, because he added: "But I'm sure yours is different."

"Oh, well, yeah, mine's a little different. I'm trying to get it published."

"Oh, you have an agent?" He perked up.

"Um, not yet, but I'm working on it."

"Oh." He glanced outside. "Well, good luck with that. I have to get back to work. I can't give them another reason to fire me."

She stared down at her sandwich and thought of all the abandoned manuscripts sitting in other people's desk drawers. Her stomach felt unsettled, like something was crawling around inside. What made her book different from theirs? She knew a lot of good writers. Glenn was one. But he'd packed it up and moved on to other things.

Well, she didn't have anything to move on to; that would help. And there it is: the silver lining of my failed career, she thought. She tried to quiet her fresh doubts. This had to work. It had to. There was nothing else. She picked up her sandwich and put it back down. She wasn't so hungry anymore.


Next week: Rory gives her first draft to Jess; Michel tests products for the spa; Lorelai asks Emily for a favor.