Disclaimer: Yeah whatever hers not mine blah blah theirs not mine yada yada.
AN: Shout-out to PurryCat, whose suggestions and feedback are invaluable, and whose friendship is beyond price. Couldn't do it without her!
ANOTHER DOUBLE CHAPTER DAY! End of this chronologically dovetails with next.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Without marriage, or the excuse of it, Emily Gilmore found herself in a dreadful position.
She was bored.
Oh, thrice a week she had some sort of excuse or event in the evenings, and she had taken over several more positions of power in her various charity organizations, but this particular morning, Emily was bored.
It was not that she had become ostracized. It was simply Sunday.
Her friends had not abandoned her, as divorce no longer held quite the same stigma for a woman who won the house, the diamonds, the jewels, the alimony, and the moral victory. Her daughter had done something awful, Richard had sided with that horrid disgrace, and worse, had left Emily high and dry. It was shocking, and gossip-worthy, but… It had been over a year, Emily clearly came out the winner, and Richard barely showed his face.
Well, he did not often show it outside the golf club and the euphemistic "club" that really meant "place where men hang out to sneak cigars and read things their wives would not approve". Emily remembered clearly having an argument with Lorelai (what else did they have?) when teen Lorelai demanded to know why Richard's club denied membership to women.
The scene popped into memory, now that she was done pretending to garden by inspecting the flowers for weeds and pests.
"It's not fair!" yelled teen Lorelai, arms folded just below her new-bloomed breasts, and her face red and white with hurt. Emily drank from her sherry, and snapped, "Why would we want to go in there, Lorelai? You have no sense, no sense whatsoever! I don't want men at my manicures, why should I intrude on their filth?" And, of course, Lorelai shouted, "It's not fair! You know how many deals get made there and women get left out!" To which a harried Emily retorted, "And you have no idea how many are made because women handle matters amongst themselves!"
As she recalled, tapping a fingernail on her lower lip enough to show her pensive train of thought but not enough to mar the lipstick, Lorelai had thrown up her hands, snuck out a window, and gone gallivanting about in tears and t-shirts and annoying music as usual.
That inspired Emily to smile, and walk upstairs at a crisp pace. Her low-heeled shoes made no sound on the tasteful runner covering the stairs, or the hallway. She mentally noted the need for newer carpeting, and opened a door with two twists of a key only she owned.
The small room held many stored items, each in its properly labeled crate.
She looked at one, and nodded. It was not very large, but she made a point of telling the maid to help her at once.
After two hours of driving around, she finally found a place that was open, and also suited her temper and her purpose.
"I suppose it will take weeks to transfer this footage to more modern formatting," said Emily disdainfully. The child behind the counter had pimples, for pity's sake, and yet was entrusted with responsibility. It boggled the mind.
"If you had all this on eight-millimeter, yeah, we'd need a lot more time, but this is all VHS."
"Well, you aren't open on Sunday in order to talk. How soon can I have the first, oh…" Emily counted. "Four?"
"Slow day here, give me two hours, we've got great new software and…"
"I'll be back at noon precisely."
At noon precisely, Emily was digesting a light brunch from a suitable hotel restaurant, and standing with toe tapping. The youngster ambled at an inexcusably slow pace to the counter, and dropped a thin silver disc in front of her. "I kept the graphics the same, hope that's okay."
"Acceptable." Emily looked at the DVD, marveling at its sleekness, then scribbled a check to pay for the service. "Finish the rest, and notify me when they're ready, please."
Emily had long ago perfected turning the word please into a threat. The young man took her card (newly printed for purposes of the DAR and similar), stapled it to an extreme number of flimsy papers. "Got it, ma'am. Shouldn't be more than a few days, maybe a week."
"As long as it is done correctly," said Emily, and set off to her destination. She knew precisely to whom the DVD would go, and why, and where, and when.
Vengeance was a petty word. Emily preferred to call it education.
She breezed through the lobby of the Dragonfly Inn, into the dining room, and there found Richard and Lorelai lingering over some sort of tea and wafer-looking dessert. There were no others in the room, freeing Emily to do what she most wanted.
She flung down the DVD, startling them both into gasps, and dropped cutlery, and spilled tea in Lorelai's case.
"There! See for yourself, what we gave you, what we did for you, and how you behaved! Then tell me, Lorelai, how any of this is possibly anyone's fault but your own! Ungrateful, immature, selfish from the start!" Emily hitched her purse strap up a little, and tossed her head. "Honestly, I'd think the hospital switched babies, if…"
"I wish they had," interrupted Lorelai, color returning to her face, and her eyes narrowing. She pushed back her chair, stood, and stared at Emily with a very Trix-like contempt. "But they didn't, and here we are, Mother. Here's a thought to consider. You take credit for everything good about Rory, but you don't take credit for anything bad about me. How's that work?"
"Lorelai, enough," intervened Richard, rising slowly. "Emily, your rudeness is not appreciated."
"Oh for heaven's sake, Richard," snapped Emily, turning on him gladly, "there are no witnesses!"
"There are two," said Richard, with a deep-toned harrumph. "Myself, and Lorelai."
"I'll speak to my daughter as I see fit!"
"There is a saying, Emily, of which my mother was quite fond…"
"Pish," dismissed Emily, as she did all things Trix if possible.
"You can tell the parents by the child."
Cold struck Emily, from within, though she felt as if she had been soundly slapped.
"If Lorelai is a disaster, then she is one of our making, wouldn't you say?"
"Thanks!" spat Lorelai. "Thanks a lot, Dad!"
"Not now, Lorelai."
"Oh my God, if I had a dollar for every time one of you said not now, Lorelai, I'd be richer than either of you!"
"I'm making a point!" bellowed Richard.
"So was I!" railed Emily.
Lorelai's head bent. The silence became painful. After several moments passed, her dark curls were tossed back, and she presented to Emily the brittle mask Emily knew well.
"Thank you for coming, Dad. What an unexpected displeasure, Mom. If you'll excuse me?"
She slapped the DVD into her purse and went out of the dining room through the kitchens.
Emily turned to lash out at Richard, but his expression stopped her mid-breath.
"You have many wonderful qualities, Emily, but a forgiving nature is not among them," he stated impersonally, then nodded politely. "Good day."
Emily stood, trembling, until her outrage cooled enough for her to walk out with the prim, precise grace of a ballerina. Richard did make a good point, she conceded reluctantly. She could not risk a public scene. The private ones were terrible enough.
GG GG GG
A shriek heralded the latest spat between Davey and Martha Belleville. From her comfortable chair, Sookie blew a referee's whistle. The kids promptly toddled over to their father, who gave Sookie a shamed look of apology. Luke wondered what the story was, as the two were usually a model of harmony.
"He lied to her," said Lorelai at his elbow.
Luke jumped, spilling lemonade across the table. "What? Lorelai? Hi. So. Um. Who?"
"Jackson. He promised he'd get a vasectomy, he didn't, he lied, and this isn't as easy as it was the first two times. Age," said Lorelai austerely, and gave him a hard, brittle smile as she refilled his lemonade cup from the urn. "There you go. Happy Fourth of July."
"So she's treating him like a dog?" grumbled Luke, watching as Sookie blew the whistle, and this time received a cold drink from a small cooler.
Her own plastic cup filled, Lorelai retorted, "You mean, because she's pregnant because he lied and she's had a bad scare and the doctors want her off her feet until, y'know, she gives birth sometime in September?"
Luke felt acid rise in his throat. It wasn't the lemonade. "Oh. Uh. Yeah. You put it like that…"
She walked away, to Sookie, and began entertaining the two kids by reading from a big colorful book about American history. Insight struck as Luke observed the way Sookie and Jackson treated each other. Jackson was tip-toe-cringing around Sookie, with the same hopeful puppy expression he'd seen on Lorelai after she learned about April. Sookie's glare was sheer outrage, and for rather better reason than he'd had to be angry at Lorelai, all things considered. Sookie looked ill, under her shady beach umbrella, and fragile for a woman of normally robust health. It was the same sort of frailty he'd ignored in Lorelai. The words betrayed trust became, in Luke's head, betrayed relationship.
He heard Lorelai's desperate cry all over again: This broke us.
Lorelai looked sweetly pretty, in a white sundress with flowers on it, and a broad-rimmed white straw hat. She glanced at him, frowning, and he blushed, like he had been caught peeping.
The loss and lost-ness in her expression were too much. He turned away.
Go over there, idiot. Hug her, tell her how you wanted to take that notebook from Susan and wash it clean of Susan's touch, tell her, demanded that inner Other-Luke he'd hoped was going to shut up.
I don't know how to re-learn her. Or us. Or me, argued Luke with… Well, with himself.
She needs to know you're thinking about a baby too. The one you don't have. That you miss your daughter and she misses hers. Man up!
Glowering, Luke retreated to the diner. That Other-Luke jabbed, Coward!
Shut up shut up shut up! I can't do it! We already proved we can't be together! She didn't exactly come back to the diner, did she? No! "We'll see" means "screw you"!
The problem with the last year's turmoil was that it had apparently given his inner Other-Luke some sort of magical strength against his habitual comebacks. She has to come to the diner? Why? Oh, right, we went to her house, uninvited, a few times, so now she has to pay it back or it's not fair? That's Dad talking.
"Sh…" he began to explode.
The diner door opened, the bells tinkling.
He swallowed the rest of the profanity and mangled "Hello" into "Ho?"
"Thank you," snapped Lorelai, mouth thinning at the insulting syllable.
"Sorry, I mean, hello," stammered Luke. "Uh. Tea? Coffee? Milk?"
"Miss Patty sent me to ask for sugar. I mean white granulated sugar, not that sugar," specified Lorelai in haste, cheeks pink. "The lemonade is awful."
"Oh. Yeah. Take a dispenser, that oughta do it."
"Okay, thank you."
A few minutes later, she returned, with the emptied dispenser. He finally named how he recognized her presence without seeing her. Lorelai somehow had swish. He had no idea what that even was, really, but it fit.
"More sugar?" he asked dully, and pretended the sparkling clean counter really needed to be scrubbed. He shoved the used dispenser out of sight, not caring it landed in the bin of spare napkins.
"Miss Patty again," replied Lorelai, arms tight around herself. "Apparently, I'm supposed to come forgive you because of how miserable you've been this last year."
Rag in hand, Luke found no better response than, "Oh."
"Of course, you forgiving me is out of the question," Lorelai went on, her bland tone at odds with her rigid posture. "Despite how miserable I've been. Go Team Luke!" She pumped a fist with a sardonic twist of her mouth. "Like I'm the one who can't forgive. Like I should forget. Like, poof, we're all in again. Only you never were."
"Lorelai," he started, while his inner voice yelled many things that he didn't permit himself to actually say.
"You remember, when you'd tell me, how they're my parents, they love me, I love them, it's for Rory's sake, just hang in there, all that?"
"Uh…"
Lorelai's arms flew wide. "I know you never used those exact words, oh my God, Luke! Quibbling? Really?"
He shrank, and rubbed at his neck, wishing he hadn't. The disinfectant cleaner from the rag stung his skin.
"And you remember how I'd say you had no idea? No idea at all what they were like, after you met them and everything?"
Even inner-Luke stayed silent.
Lorelai dug in her purse, and threw a DVD at him. He caught it by reflex.
"That was in my car, don't ask why," said Lorelai with tears in her eyes. "That is what I meant. You want to know why I'm not jumping back into your life again? Watch the home movie edition of Lorelai Gilmore, Disaster On Feet!"
"I…" he began, but she'd already swirled out of the diner, returning to the picnic in the town square, and Sookie, and Sookie's kids, and Lane's twins, and all the babies who were not theirs.
He shut the blinds and locked the door, turned the sign to "Closed", and went upstairs.
Reluctant to disturb his daughter at science camp, where they were learning how to make fireworks (and to give him gray hairs), Luke dug out the user's manual for the DVD player that April had gotten him for Father's Day. "Join the century, Dad," she'd told him, with a roll of eyes worthy of a Gilmore.
An hour of cursing and electronic frustration later, he slid in the DVD given him by Lorelai.
Old home movie grainy footage came into painfully clear focus.
It was a party, and the narration was Richard's rolling, grand baritone. "Happy birthday to our Lorelai Victoria! How does it feel to be five years old?"
Luke's first reaction was a gasp. That was Lorelai? White shoes, white lacy sock things, fluffy white dress, white ribbons tying up her hair in a very formal-seeming manner. Tiny diamonds sparkled in her ears. Only when she smiled at the camera did Luke recognize her. "Daddy! Look! I got my ears pierced! They glitter!"
"Indeed they do," rumbled Richard, and Luke noted the slight irritation, the too-patient tone, of a man who would prefer to have a good nap. "What do you think of your cake?"
"I can't wait!" squealed little tiny adorable Lorelai-in-doll-clothes. "Is it chocolate? Is it?"
"Of course not!" came a brusque answer from a slimmer, ever-familiar Emily. "You'd stain your dress."
No expert on kids, Luke was pretty sure that stains and cake and birthdays were the same thing. Any birthday party he'd seen, including Rory's, involved at least one spill and lots of crumbs and frosting spatters. He didn't serve cake at the diner, but he'd seen what teens could do to a cake at April's fourteenth birthday party, and that was teens. This was tiny Lorelai. Little tiny other-doll-girls. Shouldn't someone be… Playing? Goofing around? Making chaos?
He frowned, listening as Emily scolded Lorelai for abandoning her friends, while Lorelai said they weren't friends, they were kids who belonged to Mommy's friends, and that wasn't the same. Emily's voice was quiet, but venomous, and drew him out of his reverie.
"You will sit there, you will sit quietly, and you will play with those children, Lorelai!"
"But you said we can't play, we'll get dirty."
"You can play some card game or other."
Luke's face underwent an indescribable series of contortions before he settled on expressing disbelief. What card games did kids that age even know?
"Can I pet the pony?" begged Lorelai.
"Go sit down, the pony isn't for petting."
"Then why did he come to the party? Can I ride him?"
"Later," said Emily.
After a series of gifts that included nothing Luke remembered Liz getting at that age, the footage moved outside. Emily was dismissing the pony and its handler due to a pile of pony poop on her lawn.
Lorelai's eyes were full of tears, her little fingers grabbing at Emily. "Mommy? Can I please pet him good-bye? Please?"
"Don't wrinkle my dress, Lorelai, and don't be ridiculous. He's a bad, smelly, horrible beast."
The camera had been surrendered, probably to some professional, and so Luke saw Lorelai turn pleading eyes to her father, a slimmer, exhausted Richard. "Daddy?" she asked. "Daddy, can I say good-bye to the pony?"
"Not now, Lorelai, listen to your mother!" said Richard, flushed from what Luke figured was his sixth martini.
There were kids at the party. Small miniatures of their parents, minus alcoholic drinks, listening to the music the adults liked, and nibbling slivers of cake with more decorum than the adults in most cases. There was no ice cream. There was tiny Lorelai, robotically thanking adults for coming and for giving her presents, already wearing the smile he knew too well. The wrong smile.
An elegant graphic next read Lorelai Victoria Gilmore Christmas in London 1978.
He punched the remote control to make it stop.
She had told him about it. Never in detail, of course, and he'd respected that. It was too painful for her. Or, he admitted ruefully, he'd dismissed it as a case of poor-little-rich-kid blues. Everything in the world, no pennies pinched, poor little girl had it all handed to her, and came slumming to pretend she'd worked her way up.
All of him shook in denial of what he'd seen in that video. Not one hug, not one kiss, not one laugh, not one scoop of ice cream, at a little kid's birthday party?
Luke exhaled hard, breathed in carefully. His head spun. He remembered vaguely something about his tenth birthday being celebrated. A new ball glove, nosebleed seats to a Bosox game, his mom's spice cake with the magically fluffy frosting nobody could replicate, root beer floats, a scratch game of ball in the park with the parents, the sister, a few pals, even Uncle Louie on the sidelines mocking everyone. They had four to a side, so it was more like an elaborate game of "Catch", but the thwack of the ball in his new glove still haunted his dreams as one of the sweetest sounds of his young life.
He also didn't recall if his mother cared about stained clothing, but she probably hadn't, since he did remember his dad cheering her to "Slide! Slide!" into an imaginary base in their back yard.
Sure, he'd wrecked his bicycle and all that, lots of scolding, that same summer. Still had a small scar on one elbow from contact with pavement. Yet his mother's first reaction when he came home had been to hug him, blood and dirt included.
He discovered his face felt hot and wet. He touched his stubble. It was collecting tears.
Drunk adults at a party for little kids, and then, ten years later, those adults were yelling at those same kids for getting drunk. He knew that much from hints and bits and pieces about Lorelai's life. Yet what did the kids see was a party?
He went to the window. He could just glimpse Lorelai, reading stories to Davey, while little Martha dozed. Jackson and Sookie seemed to be having an intense discussion.
He dug around in a closet, and found a pair of photo albums. There were very few pictures taken after their mother died, but there he and Liz were, from first teeth onward. Old-fashioned little black-and-white snapshots, then color photos. He laughed to himself at some, at the birthday and Christmas and championship and award moments captured on film. Streamers. Cake crumbs. Piles of torn wrapping paper. A few random photos. His mom always the one behind the camera, his dad giving the camera a surly smile of "Since you insist..."A few sparse photos of Ellie Danes, snuck by Liz and about as artistic as any photo by a kid would be, just as their mother was folding laundry or something mundane, because at no other time did the woman seem to sit still. Nor, admitted Luke, had he and Liz left her much time when young. April exhausted him as a teen. Two kids, pre-adolescent, needing food and care and clean clothes wore him out in theory. Yet she'd made time to take those photos and wrap those presents and help him remember how good it was before it was bad.
In all of the pictures, there was little regard for how the photo would look on the wall. Nothing like that birthday party footage. It was nothing like the photos displayed by Emily Gilmore in her Hartford mansion.
Mustering up his courage, he decided to watch a London Christmas with the Gilmores. It was hot July, but he shivered.
GG GG GG
AN: This is a rather messy fic, I freely admit, as the currents of emotional reactions ebb and flow, push and pull. Each one has a lot to sort out, and it's… Well, it's messy. Old bad emotional habits die harder than nicotine addiction.