Disclaimer: Theirs.
AN added pre-posting, post-writing: OMG. Thank you all so much! I've never hit this many reads or follows I think in total for everything ever! I am humbled, terrified, grateful, awed, and mostly hoping that you'll still be here at the end. If nothing else, there'll be moments of food glory, including macaroons...
CHAPTER SEVEN
Running from bad memories wasn't uncommon. People did it all the time. They moved to new towns after tragedy struck. They avoided places that made them sad. Or, in Lorelai Gilmore's case, they moved to a little house a few streets away.
The house suited her. It lacked overt frills, a basic Cape Cod of the classic kind, with its single story, a front door for a nose, an eye-window to each side of that. The house was old enough to have the original central chimney, and no dormers, but there were windows in each gable end of the attic space. The attic was its own single long thin room, bisected by the chimney, perfect for storage. The chimney had long ago been sealed off, leaving Lorelai with a useless fireplace in her living room on one side and her bedroom on the other. Why someone made a wall over it in the kitchen, but not the other rooms, was another quirk, to be embraced.
The eat-in kitchen lay behind the living room, and the bathroom behind the bedroom. A back door opened onto a porch. It was small, she reflected, but the windows gave lots of light, and the attic gave space, and there were no stairs to scare the dog. It had age. It had quaintness. It wasn't falling apart. It was, really, a good place to live.
"You're going to get old and die here," predicted Sookie gloomily. "This is half a house. Barely. Like something out of the Salem witch trials."
"Thanks, glad you like it," replied Lorelai flippantly, and shoved a photo album into the scant space remaining on a bookshelf. "I can afford it, Sook. No renovations needed. Nice little porch, big back yard all fenced in so Paul Anka can Are You En around…"
"He's scared of the word run?"
The dog whined and crawled into the useless fireplace, behind the decorative screen Lorelai had placed there. The fireplace in her bedroom held a shoe rack.
"Sookie!" she hissed in reprimand. She pointed urgently at the dog, glaring.
Sookie wilted. "Sorry," she muttered. "Are You En?"
"The move was very traumatizing," defended Lorelai. "And I have two maple trees, and it's pretty this time of year!"
That was true. The scarlet of the maples in autumn exactly matched the scarlet trim and shutters of the little white house. Lorelai had gone small, not dull. She planned to paint the driveway, as well. "Yellow brick road," she said to Sookie, "or something more, y'know, middle-aged and sensible?"
"Compromise," suggested Sookie, recoiling with a grimace at the picture of the yellow-brick-painted driveway in the magazine Lorelai held. "That's disgusting. Maybe stick to classic concrete gray? I think Jackson knows someone who stains concrete, I mean, on purpose, for a living. Maybe something, um, European-ish?"
Lorelai tried to force herself into a cheerful assessment of European-ish. "Like what?"
Shrugging, Sookie returned to filing the movies into order in their cabinet. "Terra cotta? That's reddish but not screaming blood red. Do I put Sleepless in Seattle under S for title, or R for Meg Ryan?"
"I'm going with titles right now. I can change it later." Unspoken by Lorelai was the sad thought she'd have nothing better to do. Without the diner in her life, or a man, her social life consisted of taking Paul Anka for walks, work, and town meetings. "I was thinking maybe some concrete geese out front, I saw in this magazine, you can make little outfits for them."
A hand slapped her head.
"Ow!"
Sookie stood over her, wrathful and redder than her hair. "You. Are. Not. That. Pathetic! Concrete geese? In outfits?" She shook her hand as if it held a wooden spoon. "Snap out of it, Lorelai, you aren't a lawn goose girl!"
"Sook…"
"Maybe, just maybe, I can handle this… Ugh…"
"House," supplied Lorelai, arms folded, lower lip jutting forward.
"But enough's enough! I get it, we're not getting younger! No kids, no man, boo-hoo-you!" ranted Sookie, shaking a finger now in lieu of kitchen implement. Lorelai ducked as if her best friend held a knife. "But this? Where the heck is Rory going to sleep?"
"I'll buy us bunk beds," snapped Lorelai, standing with care. "Look, I hate this. Half my life got sold for dimes! But that house was Luke, and that's done, and I can't do it anymore, okay? I am done, Sookie! I'm done pretending I'm ever going to have this fairy tale! You got it, I'm glad for you, but I screwed up, I don't get it, end of story, okay?"
Breathing hard, the two friends stared at one another.
Sookie teared up. "I hate seeing you like this."
"I hate this," agreed Lorelai, and started to sniffle. "Dammit, I'm done crying! I dunno, maybe I should've just grabbed a man in my twenties, and given Rory a couple brothers and sisters, and if I got divorced, hey, at least I got married, right?"
She'd no idea how tightly she'd huddled into herself until Sookie rubbed a hand on her back, like she was soothing a fretful infant. "Hey. You know you'd never put Rory through that. You wanted the right guy. I just…"
"Say it," sighed Lorelai, and hiccupped a forlorn half-sob.
"We all thought it was Luke."
Lorelai shook her head, not certain what she denied, and navigated her way into her kitchen. She plugged in a small device, poured in tap water, pushed a button, and within moments, had hot water for a cup of tea. She liked that it took only sixty seconds. Much quicker than coffee. She'd embraced tea. It came with caffeine, and interesting names like oolong and pekoe. She could also cover its taste more readily than she could mask the flavor of not-Luke coffee.
"Oh shoot," said Sookie uneasily. "I gotta get back to the kitchen before Manny ruins something. Don't forget, lasagna in the fridge, manicotti in the freezer, Jackson's had amazing tomatoes this year."
Lorelai bit back an obligatory "Dirty!" in favor of, "Thanks, Sook. I mean it."
Sookie squeezed her in a tight hug, scolded fondly, "Eat!" and was gone.
Slowly, Lorelai eased open a pretty pink-striped box.
In it were all the notes and letters she'd been given by Michel, with the comment, "He is interfering with our post again."
She shuffled them loosely with her fingers. I miss you on an order slip. A snatch of I want to be the guy. A cryptic I didn't tell you about some stuff.
Every week, she received words that, a year earlier, she would have treasured. Six months earlier, she'd have sobbed in gratitude that he wanted to communicate.
She had rid herself of the quacking clock, as it happened, but the pink face of a certain pop-culture kitty still adorned some of her cups. That had been one of the strangest notes of all. Why did Luke care what she did with the things he found ridiculous?
Someone knocked on her door. Well, thumped. She sighed. Babette would be missed. She'd always known it was Babette. The screechy, "Hey sugar!" was unmistakable. She had new neighbors to learn.
She opened her door, mentally noting she had to get one of those peephole thing-a-ma-whatevers, and lost all capacity to breathe.
Luke and April stood on her doorstep.
Each held a cardboard box.
Luke stared at her. He looked, she thought, like she felt. Kicked in the most painful place possible.
In the back of his truck stood the weathered chuppah.
She gasped out, "What are you doing?!"
April cleared her throat and offered timidly, "Um, returning the things you sold that my mom bought for her shop because, after, uh, well, all that, I hate being thirteen, I used to be able to make sentences!"
Lorelai relieved the girl of her box and stepped back. April took that as an invitation to enter, pushing her glasses up her nose and not quite fidgeting.
"I just… Luke and I thought maybe…"
Luke said in a low voice, "I wasn't going to let Anna make money off you."
"Anna didn't do this to us!" spat Lorelai, quickly turned to April and said gently, "And neither did you, sweetie, but you better wait outside, this is definitely R-rated territory."
April said reasonably, "I have an adult with me."
"Then it's NC-17," improvised Lorelai, and smiled her hugest, falsest smile of reassurance.
April shot Luke a dark-eyed death-glare, then went outside with a mutter about adults that was probably rated at least R, if not NC-17.
Lorelai yanked the box from Luke, set it down atop other boxes, and had no chance to yell at him. He got in first.
"Look, I know, the boat thing! Only in reverse! But the chuppah's going to Mrs. Kim, okay? She wanted me to re-finish it since I made it!"
"Okay, and I know she bought it, she put in a bid before the ink on the flyers was dry," Lorelai simmered. She folded her arms, eyes narrowed. "I sold that clock."
"For two bucks," said Luke harshly, "and Anna was gonna charge twenty."
"Good for her, smart… Wait, twenty? Oh my God, she overprices worse than I thought! Is it because vanilla is expensive and she paints the place in it? No, never mind, that's not the point, the point was, I get it, but maybe you don't, and…"
"My parents were gonna get divorced when my mom died."
Train of thought thoroughly derailed into a canyon, Lorelai sat down in shock. As it happened, she landed on the arm of her couch, striking her tailbone. "You never said that."
Luke scuffed the floor, looking down, and reminded her vividly of a teen Jess. "Uh. No. It messed us up. Then she died."
Lorelai waited for more information. Since none was forthcoming, she prodded bitterly, "I don't play Twenty Questions with you anymore, Luke."
He flushed. His eyes went to hers, and skipped away, stopped when he saw Paul Anka in the fireplace. He shook his head slightly, and said, "We were getting older and she wanted to get her degree. Dad didn't see why. We were enough." He paused, and adjusted his ball cap unnecessarily. "We were supposed to be enough. The way it was. Liz told me a couple hundred times this past summer, I'd turned into Dad, not Uncle Louie, and, oh geez!" he exclaimed, and dug into his jeans pocket. He handed her a letter. "Here! I wrote it down!"
Not applauding sarcastically took a bit of willpower. Lorelai exhaled, counting to fifty, then set aside the envelope. "Okay. What, exactly, of mine did you buy?"
"We didn't."
Lorelai's eyebrows shot up. She hit her feet. "What do you…"
"Anna has no idea we took that stuff out of her inventory," said Luke, red to his receding hairline. "We, uh, repatriated it."
"April," decided Lorelai, sniggering. "No way you'd use the word repatriated."
"Okay, fine, my kid's smarter than me! Yeah, she, uh, went with Anna, and she wrote a list of all of it." Luke's voice dropped to normal volume. He smiled a little ruefully. "She wanted to see you. April. But you had Rory in charge."
"I couldn't do it," Lorelai admitted reluctantly, and twisted a nonexistent ring on her left hand. "I did okay till the night before, then I sorta wigged out. I spent the day with my dad. We went to the movies and ate pretzels, and you don't need to know that."
He glanced at the door.
"Right, time to go," said Lorelai, and politely opened her front door. "Thanks, but I really don't want you and April in trouble with Anna."
Luke whistled suddenly, eyes stuck on something. "Wow. That's the original brickwork in the chimney."
"Yes, the house was built in 1802, you can see the little plaque thing on a rock by the street, from when Taylor and the historical society…"
"Yeah, I remember," shuddered Luke, and put an arm out. April stepped under it, as if she were a crutch. "Don't worry about Anna."
For months now, Lorelai had enjoyed not worrying about Anna Nardini. She bit out a crisp, "I have to, if she wants her legally purchased items back. Or her money."
"She won't. I used my allowance," said April brightly. "To balance her books. See? No problem."
Lorelai could foresee endless problems. "I'll put those boxes on the back porch, just in case. It was nice to see you, April, and thank you for the thought."
The ever-intrepid April shrank. "I had to," she whispered, and ducked behind her hair as much as possible. "I overheard Mom tell my grandmother. About engaged isn't married and it proved she was right."
"Well, your mother was right," said Lorelai with brittle lightness. "Engaged isn't married. It's foliage season, Luke, the diner'll be busy."
Inwardly, Lorelai smacked herself for sounding like Taylor.
Luke nodded. He and April retreated to the street, where his truck was parked. April stopped to read the informative plaque on the granite boulder marking Lorelai's driveway. Lorelai slipped inside, wishing Luke would not look at her. It reminded her of more than she wanted to remember.
GG GG GG
Richard Gilmore was feeling old.
Every single place his agent offered to show him was, without question, meant for a doddering idiot on his last legs. The brochures pictured unrealistically tan and smiling people with white hair, playing tennis, golfing, having what looked like social events his generation had called "mixers". Richard knew the more a brochure promoted such, the less likely it was to be truth.
He turned his attention to the misery of the moment.
"I am willing to negotiate, Richard," said Emily in that terrible, prim voice she used on the Daughters of the American Revolution.
He'd enjoyed the stately house in the dignified old-money section of Hartford. Losing it was the one point on which he stuck in the legal proceedings of separation and divorce. That was a Gilmore house.
On the other hand, and that hand held the pen that signed checks, he could negotiate, too.
"As am I, Emily," he replied finally. His divorce attorney was a sleek barracuda of a woman surnamed Mather (no relation to the famed early Mathers, but no one needed to know that). Emily's was a tortoise-like man called Hutchinson (no relation to the early famed Anne Hutchinson, and quite proud to say so), infamous for gaining money for clients even if the aforesaid client happened to be caught committing adultery on video. Hutchinson plodded along with great determination, no matter what strikes were made at him, but Mather so far had kept him in his shell. Until Emily demanded the house. Not only the house on Martha's Vineyard, but the house in Hartford, and a share of his investment in Lorelai's inn.
"I will concede the Hartford house to you, in its entirety, minus my personal belongings and such Gilmore family heirlooms as are specifically mine."
"You can have that awful bronze bust with my thanks," chirped Emily sweetly.
"On one condition," said Richard.
"Oh?"
"In due time, the house will be left to our granddaughter. It will remain a Gilmore house."
"Or?" sniffed Emily, but he read anxiety in her sudden stiffening of spine.
"Or nothing, Emily. This is not a bargaining session. This is a statement of fact." He took off his glasses, set them down and eased back in the chair, facing Emily across the table as if it were a family dinner. "That is how it will happen."
"And why would you give up the house this easily?" snapped Emily shrilly, twisting at a diamond tennis bracelet he didn't recognize. A comfort purchase, he supposed.
"Because you will drop all claim to any investment in the Dragonfly Inn."
He'd guessed accurately. Emily's breath left her. She flushed. "I will not!"
"Yes, Emily, you will. You will not use our divorce as leverage to involve yourself in our daughter's life where she is not amenable to it."
"How dare you!"
Richard's temper, long frayed, finally broke. "Do not tell me what I may or may not dare! You chose the curtains, the furniture, the plants in the garden, the clubs, the dinners, the charity events, and you did it brilliantly, but you will not order me! Our daughter gave in too much for love, and so did I, which is a rather bizarre similarity to discover, but no more! We sell the Vineyard property, you stay out of the Dragonfly, and you have the Hartford house on condition you leave it to Rory."
"But not your dear little Lorelai?" sniped Emily, and Richard dropped into his chair, pleased that his heart did not trouble him, in the medical sense. Figuratively, it ached.
"She is our child, but she would not want the house. Rory, however, would benefit from the connection, the stability, and the prestige associated with such a bequest."
"I gave you a perfect life, Richard!"
A poet might have had the words to explain, but Richard did not. He settled for a rumbled, sympathetic, "If we'd allowed more imperfection, we might not be here. Now. That is the offer. Fight it, and this goes to court, and we both lose face."
"Why did you take Lorelai's side?"
Unsurprised by the question, to his own sorrow, Richard answered calmly, "I took my own. We're done here for today. Accept, and we can part in courtesy."
"If I don't accept?"
"Oh Emily," smiled Richard, tucking his eyeglasses into their case inside his suit jacket. "In the years you've known me, how often have I lost?"
He nodded to her attorney, bid them all a good day, and stopped at a water fountain to take his pill on schedule. He then texted Joshua to inform him that he was being a good patient, against all inclinations to be contrary.
"My devil in the blue dress," he said sadly, under his breath, as Emily marched past.
A hand tapped his shoulder. He blinked, gave a genial half-smile to his attorney. "Yes, Miss Mather."
"She'll accept," said Mather, in a high-society accent not even Emily could match. Those not born to it had a tendency to perfect it, he'd learned. "Are you all right, Mr. Gilmore?"
"Define all right," he said. "Then I will get back to you."
GG GG GG
AN: Nod to American history nuts: Mather. Hutchinson. Early notables of New England.
The Cape Cod style house was popular in colonial times, and re-popularized in the mid-1900s, in larger form. I gave Lorelai an original. As for the backstory of the Danes family? I based it on something a psychologist pal said after I urged her to Netflix binge the show: Everyone on GG acts like a child of divorce. And, yes, people dressing up concrete geese in their yard really happens. I don't own the movies or the movie stars, or so forth, duh.