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Chapter Text

Pick your left foot up

When your right foot's down

Come on legs keep movin'

Don't you lose no ground

You just keep on keepin'

On the road that you choose

Don't you give up walkin'

'Cause you gave up shoes.

“Ease On Down the Road” from The Wiz (Broadway, 1975)

Back in ‘66, when every night was young and the Broadway lights gave Tiffany’s windows a run for their diamonds, Ricardo Montalban told her, “Pat. Hey, Patty, Pittypat, Pat-on-cue, know what you are?”

They were as drunk as a brace of monkeys (it was that good a premiere), but her feet were seeing him home, even as his arm kept her safe and landlocked. There might  be a sailor for her in the late hours, a buccaneer even, who knew? It was that young a night. But for now she was content with Ricardo’s platonic arm by her side. Glad man, wise man, a man to remember.

“A lightmaker,” he said, his tone happy. ”That’s you, Pattycake.”

“Because I leave the rainmaking to you, Ric-o’’ (patting his camel’s-hair lapels).

“No, no. Because I heard you last month, telling that kid Sam to go triple threat even if he never sang or spoke a line in his lifetime - that learning to push his voice forward would give his bod the right chutzpah and, Christ! did you see him tonight?”

She laughed. Yes, young Sam had stepped and piqué’d like nobody’s show business.

“See? I say we move him to front line. You did good there, Patty. You have an eye with the young’uns, and I don’t mean the roving eye. You help them see the light.”

Years later, a well-off, well-rounded (and how!) theatre vet cooling her toes in a small country town, she made his words her motto. No matter how old the kid, be they four (“Or you could help me find words for the song, Rory”), fourteen (“Try boiling the egg in the water , Kirk”), or forty-nine (“Taylor, the sideburns have to go”), Miss Patty lit those lights. She wasn’t always wise, as testified by four divorce courts so far, but her eyes were as good as young, and her heart ditto.

So when young Dean came up to her, tall, dark and wholesome, saying Rory this and Rory that, and would she kindly point him to a job, please and thank you (and Rory)? She felt her heart smile, and sigh across the smile.

“Wearing his hope on his leather sleeve,” she told Babette upon their next catch-up drink. “And a boyfriend bob, oh my. You know, with his hair parted in the middle, very nice hair, too, and -.”

“Ya know the boyfriend bob is what the girl wears, right?”

Miss Patty only raised her majestic chin. “You wait and see,” she said.

Babette waited; Patty saw. Her open-door-policy studio was a stage, filled with colour and life, but it was a first-row seat, too, with an unspoilable view on Stars Hollow’s bigger and continuous variety revue. Stars Hollow was a show that kept giving, with Miss Patty a keen spectator, and, like Shakespeare’s Puck, an actor too if she saw cause. And while Dean and Rory’s idyl was only one of many songs and dances, a foil to Taylor’s Pulcinello act or the will-they-won’t-they tap duet of Luke and Lorelai, it was a dear one. Over the year, Miss Patty watched Rory bloom from introvert to ingénue, coaxed by that good strong love to unfurl her petals one by one and take a step into the limelight. Even their quarrels were prop quarrels (Miss Patty had lent the Donna Reed dress - a relic of her Band Wagon days). Comedies of errors, April rains brought to a kiss and a quick rainbow by a riff on the town minstrel’s guitar.

Ah, young love.

When their big number came - a white ballet, no less, attended by the most elite audience - Dean came again to her for help, and Miss Patty was thrilled to play dancing coach. Again. (And again, long after Rory had gone home; his “I don’t want to let her down” slightly too anxious, loaded with more than a mere “I don’t want to trip and land her in the caviar fountain”). But he made it. They both did, Lorelai  prattled the next day, promising her a picture for her memento wall. And they looked so great nailing their big number, every inch - yard, in his case - Mr. and Mrs. Bride Barbie in that white-iced cake of a decor, mmmm, butter cake!

Only later did Patty remember - the big number comes right before curtain.

And only in showbiz does curtain (courtesy of Mr. Lloyd Webber) equate love never dies .

In life, the show does go on. And, Patty knew to her loss, loves nothing more than to call out “Change partners!” while the first violins are still hot and panting in your ear. Oh, she knew. She knew the minute she stepped out of the Independence Inn for a breather, having declined the horse (too frisky) and driver (not half frisky enough) in favour of an apéritif, and spotted Rory’s sleigh returning with its cargo of two. She stayed under cover of the gigantic blue spruce in the yard and waited, and she saw more than enough.

She was not surprised when, upon her going to Mass the next day, Reverend Skinner ambushed her at the church door and said, “Taylor’s just informed me that we have a local snowman iconoclast. Should I be concerned?”

“I doubt he’ll target your Nativity next, Archie. It's February.”

“About Taylor.” The wise brown gaze, Ricardo’s true heir, found and held hers. “Young Forester works for him, doesn’t he? And Taylor has never dealt well with breakage.”

Which was Archie’s roundabout How many heartbreaks are we anticipating, to which she could only answer, “Well, he did give Mr. Briscoe a consolatory voucher. For frozen yogurt.”

“Ah yes, the February comfort food.”

“A three-dollar voucher” - Taylor’s bristling head had made itself at home between theirs - “to be fully refunded by Luke, qua guardian of that… that… that desecrator. That mini-mobster menacing us with malicious mischief!”

“Please say that again and make my Sunday, Taylor.”

Taylor, ignoring him, turned to his town vizir. “What was that about Dean, Patty?”

She sidetracked him with a smooth pirouette (verbal these days, alas). But his ear had perked up, and the very next day he summoned her and a few town worthies for an inner circle council because “we need to talk about Dean”. Who, it turned out, had cancelled two shifts in a row so he could work on a car for Rory and, a more cardinal sin, had piled up the canned pears on the shelf dedicated to the canned Borax.

“But where did he store the Borax?” (Andrew, somewhat anxiously.)

“Never mind the Borax! Can’t you see what’s happening here? That boy’s mind is not on his job. He’s unhappy, he’s suspicious - confused - addled in his head and heart, and as a result my shop is on the brink of collapse! We have to do something.”

Kirk, who had somehow gatecrashed the circle, raised his hand. “I disagree. Only the truly confused know that pears rhyme with ears - no confused in his rightful mind would ever pile them up in a public space.”

Not waiting for everybody else to parse this, Taylor took up his point. “I say we roll up our sleeves and put an end to Jess Mariano’s attempt to sabotage Dean’s and Doose’s welfare. Andrew! What books are in your shop window this week?”

Andrew lightened up. “Hamlet. Hemingway. Catcher in the Rye - you know, Holden Caulfield. I’m doing an alphabetic theme this year, and -”

“Throw them out. We don’t want to provide Rory with more Jess fuel. From now on, until further municipal notice, you will display biographies of pure, healthy, hard-working baseball players. Reverend!”

“Let me guess. You want me to impress young Rory with a sermon on conjugal fidelity?”

“Well, yes, now you mention it. What about the Cana episode? You know -  the good wine comes first and the cheap wine second, so make sure you stick to the first if you know what’s good for you.”

“Ah, but Jesus would beg to differ. He made it so the best wine was served last.”

Thus was the meeting brought to its inconclusive end. Not that Patty wished it otherwise. Jess Mariano might have cast himself as Stars Hollow's Lord of Misrule, but that was no reason to sic Stars Hollow on him. Patty still recalled Dean’s brief and entirely unfair stay in the town doghouse after his first break-up with Rory - a lesson that, while it may take a village to raise a child, said village has no damn call to go and pitchfork up against another kid. She told Taylor so in no uncertain terms and took home his Et tu, Patty? reproving look.

Still, what he said about Dean...

She felt uneasy. She felt the old itch brush her toes, the urge to step in and drill them through their next act before it ended up a trainwreck, well, sleigh wreck (to say nothing of that new car). It felt to her that she still had unfinished business with the young things, especially Dean. She had found him a job; taught him to dance; consequently, she experienced the age-old paradox that the more you help someone out, the more you feel a sense of obligation to them. Rory’s Dean he might be, but he’d been Patty’s Dean first. A subtle, invisible thread of responsibility shimmered between them, for her eyes only.

Yet nothing much happened. Rory's life continued to orbit around its double foci of school and Mom, tacking on an honorary focus, which was to let Jess watch her like a hawk in a hoodie. Dean watched Jess watching her. Patty watched Dean watching Jess watch Rory - and sighed a heartfelt sigh. That boy got more trouble than the entire cast of The Music Man.

He was growing fast, their Dean-o, and she joked about it with Lorelei and Babette (“We have a Morey contender!”). Yet a fear lurked at the bottom of the quip - that the heart’s growing pains would be too much for him. He put her in mind of the yellow daisy she’d picked up on the market place at the close of summer, when they’d come in thousands (all right, one thousand); or rather, he reminded her of another flower long ago, the reason she’d plucked a yellow souvenir of Lorelei’s amours. The longago flower had been a daffodil - Sinjen’s gift to her when they were young and in love, three parts broke to one part on the roll, so cars were sadly off the cards. Patty had kept it in a tumbler as long as she could. After a while, the water in the glass had taken on a lovely yellow-gold sheen, as if taking its cue straight from the flower. A thing of beauty! But, not long after, the yellow in the glass had clouded up and turned bilious, even as the flower’s bell shrivelled and browned.

She feared that the same might happen to Dean, who had let his love for Rory colour him through and through.

No heart, however young and strong, can take that much stagnancy.

February had a meltdown; March breezed in with translucent light, crayon blue skies and ye auld courting auctions.

Up woke the old husband fever, regular as hay fever. Patty bought her basket early; dug out Sergio’s yellowing, dog-eared cookery book (he’d known the way to her heart all right) and let the nostalgia take over. Not that it ever did her any good. But, just for a night, it was good to swathe herself in the warm scents of sage and butter, chaperoning Sergio’s focaccia, toss a gourmet salad and lash out on orange syrup and cardamome as she rolled that last baklava finger. As a finishing touch she tied a large velvet bow to the basket handle. Que sera, sera, as poor Doris had shrugged on their respective fourth and third bachelorette nights, a shared-cost extravaganza at Studio 64.

Love was on the cards, Patty decided, and even found time to set up a four-of-a-kind for Lorelai. (Still young. Very much in need of a light - no, make that a laser show.)

But all thoughts of out-Daying Doris vanished the moment Dean launched his bid and Jess launched his rocket attack. She had seen some pretty harsh public scenes in her days, but this? Was a new harsh. And so she waited for Rory to parr the crisis with the obvious repartee: that while the rules made it compulsory for her to escort Jess, she woud have Dean escort her. Our duo is now up to three, and that’s the bottom line. Surely, any girl in love - be they half the wit and quote boffin Rory was - would know what to say?

Rory made it as far as rules.

Patty waited until Dean had stormed off, then waited a bit more because the Lorelai auction was on, and so was her barbershop quartet, beautiful lads, all chiming in, aaaaand - yes! She watched Lorelai take off like a roadrunner, and then she stepped forward, extracted her own basket with a First Lady privilege, young lady glare at the bit of fluff co-hosting Taylor’s show, and left the square.

She didn’t hurry. Dean would be on his way back from home, driven by love and confusion (and hunger - Patty bet he’d starved himself against Rory’s warning, the better to enjoy her Gilmore-brand munchies). Ah yes, there he was - wound up and tight-lipped from a frustration some would have found droll, others sullen, while it was only Dean's heavy heart weighing on his face and gaze.

Hugging the basket to her bosom, she called “Dean! The very man. I need help, Dean - or rather, this does.”

Man did it - maybe - or her best-staged look of helplessness. Slowly, with reluctant steps, he came back.

“... Patty?”

“Nobody would bid on it, poor thing,” she lied. “I guess it’s just not my day - but eh, c’est la vie. Only I made my best salad for two and home-made focaccia, and these never keep well. Please, honey, be my guest? I’ll feel better if it’s not just me eating my own lunch behind a bush.”

He paused - as he always did, whenever she needed a hand packing up lollipop costumes or fixing Taylor’s mike pre-town council. Sweet boy.

“I… I was looking for Lorelai” (only half-sullen now).

“Oh, honey, she’s with Luke.” Enjoying that laser show - hopefully. “And I’d be ever so grateful. This way I can boast the fried chicken and I had savory company for lunch!”

Ah, a tentative smile. Dimple-less and barely there, but still. Bless that chicken.

“You’re on, both of you. Gazebo?”

“Already lit up.” She smiled at his baffled gaze. “Take me home, honey. It’s just across the square.”

Back at the studio, she gave him a chair to sit on and let him eat to his heart’s content. He was still a growing boy, and as such had three goes at the chicken and still plenty of room for her baklavas, which made him a very nice, if very chaste, revel companion. Most men picked at their plates and looked a bit green around the gills when she called  “Pudding!”, but Dean’s eyes lit right up. He gave her thanks by offering to make the coffee himself.

Patty knew a cue when it entered front stage. “Oh yes, thank you, Dean. Who better than our Gilmore Boy.”

“Am I?” Ah. The bitterness up and at it, if muffled by the orange syrup. “Not with that jerk going for the champion title.”

“You mean Jess.”

“Yeah, I do! Who else? It’s not like his kind comes in doz -.” Dean paused in contrition. Remembering where he was and whose wittles he’d just shared. “Sorry, Patty. I didn’t mean to row you. But… he… he… you saw what he did over there. With me and Rory.”

“Hmm-hmm.” The chiaroscuro in her studio was soft, contemplative; the large wooden doors slid half way closed to craft the right mood for her yoga ladies. It would have been tempting to leave Dean in its shade - if the shade had done him any good. “And I saw what Rory did.”

“It’s not her fault!  He messed with her, that’s all. Flashing his bucks like I’m a small-change punk, a cheap date. Like the best I can do is take her out to Doose’s and give her a discount on shampoo!”

“Dean…” She was starting to sniff an older complaint.

“Straight from Tristan’s book.” (Bingo.) “Christ, what’s with those jerks and books? You’d think there’s a Connecticut Douche Central and they just keep spreading the word around. And Rory, she...”

He stopped, because making Rory a subject instead of he or they was opening a new can of worms and he wouldn’t pick one, wouldn’t risk baiting  an uneasy truth with it. Instead, he got up and shoved his hands deep down his pockets, the teenager’s seal-my-lips. Immediately to his left, blocking the sun’s path, was the picture of Rory that Lorelei had given Patty - Rory’s clear young face, looking up from clouds of demure silk. Dean stared at it. “Yeah,” he said, half for himself, “Yeah, that’s her. She’s so bright, okay? She makes you feel the world’s a sunnier place, just looking at her. But these days, she’s...”

“...Yes?”

“Like this. Like she’s a close-up, but too far away to touch.”

(It was, in Patty’s opinion, the saddest line ever spoken on a podium.)

Chapter Text

“She likes him.” Finally, his whisper, rough-voiced. “Why? Why did he have to make her like him? All I did was come between him and a fight.”

“Oh, sweetheart, it’s not you. It’s what you stand for.”

“What?”

“Stability. Belonging. The ease of loving and being loved. From what I hear - and I still have friends in  the New York bohême, Dean, putting their ears to the ground for me - Jess never had any of that. So yes, he’s wrong to try and attract Rory when she’s with you, but he’s not doing it because he hates you. He’s... like a sprig of ivy trying too hard to grow on its skinny little own. To cling to something that’s not school, or family, or borough, because they all let him down. But you? You, they help stand tall.”

“... Don’t make it harder to hate him.”

“Tell me something, Dean-o. Do you like hating him?”

She watched his face as he reined in his first, hot-pressed yes. Ah, those Frowny Young Men. Jess, too, would end up with an early lion’s wrinkle if he kept his brow eternally puckered.

“Yyyy... no. Sort of no. But if I’m not mad at him, then what? I don’t want to be mad at Rory. I was, once, last year, and it was dumb, and I never want to hurt her again.”

“Seems to me she’s not the one hurting now.”

“I’m fine. Just… tired of being the not-enough guy.” He frowned, again. She sighed. He misheard.

“Oh god, am I being whiny?”

“No, just unhappy.”

“So what do I do?”

He stared at her with such a desperation of trust that she - Patricia LaCosta! - was at a loss for words. She knew what his would be. He would ask her, the fairy godmother in the velvet wrap, how to get his girl back (even though she hadn’t left him yet); he would ask for a Bibbidi Boo that gave him everything they used to have, whereas there was no putting back that clock. (Ask the Great Gatsby. Better: ask Sinjen, who had fiddled with the clock not so long ago. Sinjen had been a letdown the second time because she, Patty, had changed and so had he - and while she knew it, and embraced his fugitive hairline and novel habit of whistling the same bar of Bali Ha’i eleven times running at breakfast, he hadn’t endorsed her being a Broadway broad in every sense of the word. He wanted the slim chorus girl looking up to his stage savvy, not the self-made woman waving back to half the front row and tipping the usherette a twenty.) 

She said, “Kid, she still loves you. She’s just taking you a little too much for granted. Jess is not granted; Jess is making it clear that he’s a lone hard catch. Which makes him a shiny catch.” She saw Dean's lips tauten and raised her hand. “No, no, she won’t run after him with a butterfly net. She’s your girl, and your girl wouldn’t do that. But if he takes that one tap step to the side? She’ll feel challenged to take one along. Where’s the harm? Just a little step, and it’s not like she took it first.”

He was angry now. Good. Anger would pull him out of the not-enough swamp.

“And where does that leave me?”

“In position, sticking to the mark. Waiting until she taps back to you.”

“But she’s tapping more and more away.”

“And if you tap after her, you’ll never quite catch up. Like that philosopher’s turtle my second husband loved to bring up at supper (the Beat poet, not the chef). Dean, you gave her a beautiful, beautiful car, solid and strong and lasting. Like yourself. But even that car won’t overtake Jess.”

“Because he’s... making her sing for her supper.” At least he’d caught up with her. Whoever thought Dean was slow-witted or couldn’t parse a zinger, obviously didn’t know him. Ask Lorelai, who loved the boy and wasn’t one to suffer fools gladly.

“Because he's standing outside her circle of Rory-routine. Dean, you have to understand this is something that may happen again. And again.  It’s just who we are, men and women alike. It was hardwired in us from the first - that even as we sate our need to love, we still need to long. Now and then. Even a tiny little bit. Let me put it this way. Ever heard of Home Sweet Homer ?”

“Um, no.”

“Nor should you. Most notorious flop in Broadway history. But it did make me think about Ulysses and Penelope, and here’s my take on them. Penelope loved her man. Spent those twelve years weaving him plaid blankets, in case he came home with a cold from all his shipwrecks.”

“The Greek Donna Reed.”

“Exactly.  And yet even she must have looked up at one point and thought, Mmmm, Suitor Number 29 sure isn’t like the others. He wears his toga inside out and he likes the same Sirens’ albums I do. And, oh, how he toys with me! But then Ulysses came back, brand new, because he’d lived and learnt on his own -” and banged two other dames, but she left that bit out "- and got a Sephora makeover from his mentor, which helped. And so Penelope? Forgot Suitor 29 right away. Hello sailor! Boy, did he have a nice tan, and so many interesting tales to tell. But he was familiar, too, he was protective and kind and strong and home, and it was not too late to renew their vows. See?”

“That I should get Taylor to give me a makeover?”

There! Finally, a full-dimpled smile. Cute boy. And he’d got the tan already. But he was growing serious again.

“That I should step out of her circle. Make myself new again.”

“I think your only goal for the last two years has been to be Rory’s Dean. Maybe it’s time you worked at being Dean’s Dean.”

“But I…”

He paused, and she watched the understanding dawn in his eyes. Dean saw Rory as a people-pleaser, but in truth, so was he. The job at Doose’s hadn't been his choice so much as May and Randy’s, who wanted their only son to be hard-working and responsible. And, to that end, were stingy with his allowance while shelling out for Clara, the “I want” kid. Dean excelled at hockey and softball, but he captained his team for love of being popular more than love of sport. Dean adored Rory who had been his quest, his goal, but for a long time now his love had boiled down to doing whatever it was Rory wanted him to do. It hadn’t paled on him yet, but it had certainly paled on Rory, who was now rerouting her curiosity to what Jess liked to do.

Then the old doubt ebbed back, clouding the pure hazel; the old I’m the guy everybody knows doesn’t know what he wants.

“Yes, you do. Take it from a pro, Dean, you’ve got it. You just need a little me-space to sort it out.”

“And then she’ll come back to me?”

“Honey, I can’t promise you that. In the end, it’s really up to Rory” - to sit forever between two boys, or to grow up and knock that fence down from under her tushie. Even Lorelai couldn’t cushion it forever. “But I can promise it will make you happier.”

He stood up; shook his head, letting one soft strand fall over his eye. The coffee gave an agonized burp before it settled, ruefully, to cool down. She pointed to a mug, but he returned an apologetic smile.

“If I stay away she’ll think I’m breaking us up again, and if  - if she still loves me like you say, that will break her. And I can’t. I can’t. She’s so sweet and naive, Patty, I just…” The unhappy brown eyes met hers. “Thanks. It’s not always the kindness of strangers, is it? You’ve been very good to me, and I’m grateful for all of your advice. But I guess I’ll just have to wait it out.”

Once he was gone, she took a cigarette. She lit it and stuck it in her cigarette-holder, before she walked up to the studio’s doors. The sun faced her full, knocking itself out with Spring stamina, and Miss Patty blew an expert’s ring of smoke in its direction.

“Show-off. Ah, well. I tried my best.”

The week breezed by, and then another week, which saw Miss Patty take a break between the elderlies’ Calypso drill and the kiddies’ tutu debut, both of which had started to feel like she was teaching Capoeira 101. Luke said “Patty”; nodded briefly; made her special unasked, a cocoa latte with twice the cream and that heart-shaped doodle Luke swore every time was accidental. Patty loved her lattes, hearts and all.

She was weighing the pros and cons of a refill when Lorelai rushed into the place, past her table and straight on to the counter, where she flopped down on a stool. “C.,” she gasped. “ C.! ”

“I see,” Luke said sternly. “I see a woman who needs to enun-ci-ate.”

“Too stressed,” Lorelai proclaimed, “to spell out. Need wisdom. Need compassion. Need a Yoda-shaped percolator to help me destress."

“With coffee. Yeah, that makes sense,” Luke said, but, being Luke, started the percolator. “What’s going on, Lorelai?”

“Dean and Rory. They’re - well, they’re no longer they.”

“He’s done it AGAIN?” Luke’s hand clenched into a ball, which was a shame, really, because he'd just grabbed a comfort lemon bar for Lorelai. “That little punk! I told you from the first, he -’

But Lorelai was shaking her head. “Not like that,” she said, and Patty closed her own mouth again. The tale that followed was stretched, stressed and tangled, mostly because Lorelai insisted on fitting it all into a single sentence, one that resulted in Lorelai and Luke talking over and around each other. Still, it was nowhere near as tangled as a Charles Isherwood review, and Patty got the gist of it easily.

The gist was Rory’s bracelet. Faithfully worn every day until it wasn’t, and Rory told Dean in plain hearing of Gypsy and half the book-buying subdivision of Stars Hollow that she took it off because it itched. A white lie, that came to a dark end when Dean pointed out that she hadn’t been wearing it for the last fortnight - hence the itch dated back to Founder’s Day and her afternoon with Jess. No decibel was harmed in the next reply, which proceeded with unDeanlike calm, but ended with him telling Rory that they should “stop seeing each other for a while”, until they both knew what they wanted, and could either put their relationship on a new footing or part good friends.

“Then he kissed her on the cheek and left, as testified by Gipsy and did I mention the book-buying subdivision, and why, oh, why did I ever let her have lunch with Magpie Boy?”

“... Jess?”

“Of course, Jess! Or Jeez, or whatever he calls himself these days. He had the bracelet the whole time. Damnit, Luke!” And Lorelai dropped her forehead into her hands. “I want her to date a Tony, not a Riff!”

“Are you saying my nephew took -”

“Oh. Did Dean use to head a gang in Chicago?”

“Now, look here. This is of paramount importance. Was the property stolen on town premises?”

Miss Patty rose quietly and, still quietly, made her exit. Let Lorelai deal with the Luke-Kirk-Taylor trio: she herself had word to spread. She might have failed to nip the gossip, back when when she had spotted Dean and Rory asleep together, a book between them like the proverbial sword. And again after their first break-up. But she’d be damned if she let gossip take a wrong turn this time.

The town got the message. Hopefully.

Jess did, if only because the shout-out between uncle and nephew about PILFERING IS NOT HOW WE GET THE GIRL IN THIS FAMILY PLEASE GET YOUR ACT TOGETHER JESS AND GET HER IN THE FAMILY WAY NO JESS I DON’T CARE IF THAT’S THE WRONG PHRASEOLOGY was front page news for a while.

Jess, a smart youngster, bade his time. He could see which way the dominos had fallen; he saw that Rory’s focus was no longer on him, but on resenting Dean for making her take her heart in her hands and look it in the face (never an easy task). Rory’s general feeling was that the bracelet drama had occurred without her informed consent (true): therefore she had no responsibility in it (less true). She felt betrayed. She felt she ought to show Dean both that she hurt and that she knew better than to hurt on his account. She was relieved that he hadn’t been mad about her lie; she was outraged that he hadn’t been mad at the lie’s implication that she might (from a purely hypothetical standpoint) want to move on - and, worst of all, had now appropriated the standpoint. In short, she no longer knew what to make of him.

“I don’t know what to make of it,” May Forester told Miss Fran a few days later at their common hairdresser. May was having a cut and blow-dry. Miss Fran was having “a sweet little silver icing, please”.  

“Oh dear,” said the latter, all preemptive sympathy.

“I mean, it’s nice to have him home for dinner more often. But the pay at Gipsy’s is really not the same, and she can only afford to have him twice a week. And it’s... not a very clean job. He was doing so well at Doose’s! Taylor had just offered to teach him accounting!”

(“Another minute, please,” Patty told the girl manning the helmet hair dryer. Her crown of glory could take it.)

“Perhaps he needs a little more study time?”

“Well, it’s not as if there’s any college plan for him. Dean is a good, sensible boy, always has been, but he’s hardly the college type. Clara’s the bright one.”

“Oh, Clara is such a fun little thing!”

“Isn’t she just?” May’s voice glistened with pride. “She can’t stay still, that girl of mine. I’m thinking dance lessons for her, or maybe riding lessons? She’s been prattling about horses ever since Lorelai had her over at the inn. But Dean… ”

I don’t need to hear more, Patty told herself, and motioned to the girl to lower the helmet once again. 

“Sure, I gave him the job,” Gypsy said. “Best assistant I’ve ever had.”

“First assistant you’ve ever had,” Dean corrected her, smiling, before he went off to give Patty’s old sedan a lookover.

“Not that I need one. But the boy needed a change of scene. Boy-oh-man, did he ever! I was there, you know, when Rory -’

"I know,” Miss Patty said. “I’m glad you took him, Gypsy.”

“Came to me not long after. Said he didn’t want to be tied to Doose’s apron strings for the rest of his life. You betcha,” Gypsy whispered on, her pigtails nodding vigorously. “So I gave him a payday loan for a pair of overalls - and look at him go! You won’t recognize Bernie once he’s done with it.”

“In a week or two,” Dean said, sliding out from under Bernie’s entrails. “You’ve cut my work out for me, Patty.  When was the last time you had that transmission belt changed?”

“Not since I last changed husbands.”

“Well, it’s high time you got a new one.”

“Are you offering, Dean-o?”

He laughed, and while the mirth did not quite reach his eyes, it made Patty’s heart glad.

“I'll keep to the single track for now, thanks. But I can get Bernstein hooked up all right.” A beat. Gypsy, clever Gypsy, said she’d be toting up an estimate and turned into her office.

“She called me,” Dean said with his next breath. “Again and again. I answered the first time, but she kept saying I was making all that fuss out of nothing and something about Othello and a handkerchief, and all I could think of was that tiny little glitch on her face, right before she lied to me. And she lied for my sake, I know that, but she never used to. Never. It’s not like her. I don’t want to be the guy she has to glitch around!”

“I know, honey.”

“So I stopped taking her calls. Does she hate me? And Lorelai, she must - ”

“Dean, nobody hates you. You’re one of us.” Under his doubtful look, she repeated it for good measure. “You are, you’ve made yourself part and parcel of this town, and when you leave it to go to college or wherever your heart takes you, you will leave as one of Stars Hollow’s young hopefuls.”

“I  still don’t know about that,” he said, rubbing a hand to his cheek. “I mean, this is nice. I love cars. I love things. I like to explore how they work, you know? And then I can fix them, and, sometimes, I’ll take a thing and make it into something new" - the bracelet's ghost hovered nearer - "and, and that’s great. But I don’t see myself as an all-time Handy Andy. I...”

He drew a breath, and she could sense his bracing up against an invisible rebuker.

“... I like to think, too.”

“Of course you do.”

“And I like books. I do! Just, not the classics, and not all the time.”

He was so rueful, still rubbing at that smudge of oil on his cheek, that Miss Patty nearly hijacked him to her towering bosom. Sagely, she abstained.

“You’ll work it out. Meanwhile, take care of Bernie for me?”  They turned to the car, Dean’s brows clearing up as he considered the old sedan. And thus, to keep him in that mood, she told him a not-fiction fairy tale. How Bernstein had once belonged to Bernstein (Leonard) who had bought him in the early 60es on a whim, because he was a Beetle Convertible and Lenny was a rabid Beatles fan. The Schuberts of our time, he called them.

Bernstein and Bernie got along famously for a few years, not so much on the road (Bernstein favoured a Ford for his long drives) as on the set. Just as Hitchcock loved to toddle in and out of camera sight, Bernstein insisted on smuggling the little car, his good-luck prop, onto every stage, set and location - with or without the set designer’s blessing. So Bernie made his acting debut in West Side Story, the film, where his left front light can be seen all of four seconds during “Cool” (Robert Wise, wisely, told his cameramen to focus on the great big trucks).  His last cameo was as Hildy’s taxicab in the 1963 revival of On the Town , where, on dress rehearsal night, a recklessly drunk and vertically challenged Bernstein dared the young dancers in the company to stand with him on their toes and Bernie’s yellow-coated trunk. Only one of them took the dare. She also took off her shoes and, barefoot, climbed on his car and kicked her heels, winking at Bernstein. And he (tall, dark, handsome man! sadly, a gentlemen’s man) was so delighted that he offered her the car on the spot.

So Bernie never made it to Herbie fame, but was a tried and true friend to his new owner for the next three decades.

“Yeah, yeah,” Gypsy said, back with the paperwork. “Regular old trooper, but he went bump one time too many in the night. Better check those tires, Dean.”

But Dean only said “Wow”, his eyes and mouth softened by wonder.

Chapter Text

March went. May came and, true to word, brought Clara for dance lessons.

Clara was a cute kid, gifted with the rare talent of always speaking her mind while somehow never speaking out of turn. When she made it clear after a session or two that she was bored to death with the Sugarplum Fairy, Patty moved her to the following year's interpretative class. Clara loved the challenge. She shared her brother’s mix of sunny and stubborn, and the older girls soon found out that she could tease them right back without ruffling any deep-seated feather. She had unparalleled vim. She was - miracle of miracles - still unspoiled. She was a funny kid.

She was fetched after class by her big brother, who was usually content to wave hello and leave. But on her third week, Dean lingered, grounding an impatient Clara with a promise of churros on the way home.

“Uh, would you…” He stopped, questing for words. “Would you let me use Bernie? I mean, not the car. We’re still waiting for that belt from Peoria.” (Playing Operation with Bernie had proved tricky: a number of organs were beyond vintage, and replacements had to be tracked down on the Internet. It was a good thing she had the Tushie Jog train at her command.) “I mean the Bernstein story.”

“The…”

“Not the, uh, vertically challenged part,” Dean hurried on. “Just, our History teacher’s on sick leave so Mr. MacKellan from senior year is temping for her. And he’s great! He gave us all those projects to choose from, and there’s one where you have to find a popular object and take its picture, and then write on its period culture, and so I’ve done a bit of research. Did you know Hitler invented the Volkswagen? It means “people’s car”, because he intended it as that Nazi uber family car, only when the Allies -”

“Dean, I’m hungry!”

“Honey, shoot Bernie all you like. Bring up his wicked past. Mine too, while you’re at it.” She winked, chuckling when he blushed. But his smile had, tentatively, lit up his eyes. "I’ll want to read that essay, mind you.”

“Deal,” said Dean, and let young Twinkletoes tug him to the door, and the churros stand beyond.

A Dean with a project meant a Dean who no longer moped.

A Dean who, instead, roamed alone or with a female accomplice all over the Hollow, intent on interviewing every Volkswagen in view. The female accomplice knew there was a churro on hold for every car spotted. That is, the head female accomplice. For, as the days grew sunnier and Dean’s rambles took him from the library to the street and back again, the number of amateur detectives offering to aid and abet his Beetle quest increased - all of them of the female persuasion. What Dean thought of their continued interest in his project wasn’t made public.

What became fully, staunchly, in-your-face-ly public was Rory and Jess’s revived companionship. Although, to give Jess his due, through no effort of his. It was plain to any of Luke’s regulars that, given a choice, Jess would have walked a straight line from “job” to “upstairs”, Rory in tow, and spent his free time far from the madding crowd.

Not so Rory. If they got ice cream, they had to eat it outside because ice cream tastes so much icier in the sun, it’s a proven fact. If they got coffee to go with the ice (only Rory), they had to share with Lane, who was unfairly kept short of both at home, which meant rendezvousing Lane in town. If they got ice, coffee and Hemingway for two, then it was imperative that all three be consumed on the library steps, should either reader meet with the sudden urge to cross-reference editions.

That fence, Miss Patty told herself, still had a rosy future.

Jess put up with it for a while, then went off to find himself a swan and a plausible reason to stay indoors. (Rory: “But the sun!” - Jess: “Not a fan of light reading.”) When Rory got a headache from listening to Hammerhead, Jess reluctantly agreed to move their book dates to an open air venue - i.e., Lorelai’s garden. By Easter, they had discussed every book on Rory’s shelves, Rory’s syllabus, Jess’s library card, Jess’s New York friends’ texts, and Rory and Jess’s pooled memories.

They tried discussing their lives next. With mixed success.

“The college itch,” Babette reported to Patty, with the same knowing look as if she’d said “The seven-year itch”, or “The acne itch”.

“Let me guess. She wants him to try for Harvard?”

“She thinks he’s wasting all that smartness on the Walmart job.”

“Well, it’s like homemade body butter. It pays off.”

(Jess, Patty thought, had a two-edged relationship with money. He scorned it in the abstract - cf. his tossing out ninety bucks a la Rhett Butler for a dance with Rory. And he seeked it. It was noteworthy that in all of his relentless smirking at Dean’s flaws, Jess had never pulled out the bagboy card. Jess worked just as hard at his own shifts - because his salary was his get-out-of-jail fund.)

“Yeah, but…” Babette shrugged, and Patty read Lorelai would dig it. Rory, bless her, not so much. “Then she said he should come to her school and be introduced to Max - you know, Max the Ex. Turns out he knows a guy who knows a guy who’s the honcho guy on a posh grant committee.”

“That must have gone well.”

“Cripes, no,” said Babette, on whom the antiphrasis was a lost cause. “It went rowdy. Not loud-rowdy, because he - Jess - is not one to blow his top, I’ll give him that, but he went… ya know. Full-on constipated icicle. Said no thanks, he’d let somebody else collect the 200 dollars. And she said obviously he didn’t want a future with her, and he said, wouldn’t she have to consider a present with him first? And she said -” Babette paused on a solemn breath “- nothing.”

“Hmmm.”

“Which woke Morey from his nap, and he said “Wrong note”.”

Oh, young people. Young, young, young people. Out of puberty into the frying-pan, with no idea how to settle for a nice warm glow. Instead, here was Jess sulking because Rory would not claim him in the here and now, while Rory’s heart still panged because how dared Dean suddenly get a project, a bona fide project that included LIBRARY TRIPS and PHOTO COVERAGE, right after he’d pressed “pause” on their romance? (And how dared he let those girls hold the camera that had taken so many pictures of her?)

And that was only the surface. Underneath lurked Jess’s definition of love as “you and me against the world”, a world which Rory thrilled to live in, gay and glittering on her grandparents’ side; safe and quirky on her mother’s. She hadn’t taken her leave of Stars Hollow yet, while Jess had booked his well ahead.

“Babette, do you think I should light another light? For Jess?”

Babette gave it thought, while they both sipped their Pink Ladies to Morey’s distant blues.

“Nah, don’t. Sneaky li’l So-and-So took my Pierpon.”

(“Gnome aside, would he listen?” Archie said when she cornered him on the next Sunday. “That’s the problem with Ask and  ye shall receive - first, you have to admit that you’re an asker.”)

Dean kept word and brought her his project paper after it was handed back to him with a glowing red A. Dean, too, was glowing. He put the essay in her hand with a grin and a flourish, a newly-dubbed knight laying down his first slain dragon at the Queen’s feet. (Miss Patty rather enjoyed the simile.)

The paper began with a printed picture of her car in a relaxed, not-yet-disemboweled pose, with Gypsy leaning against it. Dean traced Bernie’s history from City to Hollow and used it to showcase the Volkswagen’s general trajectory, from the twinkle in a genocidal maniac's eye to the American myth of a car that would let anybody afford a ride. Facts and statistics alternated with little tales entrusted to Dean by townies (some known to Patty, others not) who each had something to say about their Beetle Sedan and what it meant to them. It was a warm piece, couched in simple but sensitive prose by an author so committed to his subject that he had coaxed his Chicago relatives into taking up the trail and finding him a press picture of Bernie’s last stage appearance, its convertible roof down, as Bernstein’s Hildy’s taxicab. The VW Beetle, Dean concluded, had followed a long road, from Hitler’s dream of strength, purity of line, one-coloured stock to playing sidekick to a Jewish composer, a multiracial mechanic and a Hispanic American soprano...

(Mezzo-contralto, actually. But she’d allow him some artistic licence.)

… and it had proved Sir William Rootes wrong. For hadn't the posh British car tycoon scoffed at it in 1945, stating that it was “just not enough to attract the average motorcar buyer”? The Beetle might not have looked much to the educated eye, but it had proved enough.

(You tell’em, kid.)

Whether Mr. MacKellan had seen through Dean’s fierce underlining or not, it was clear that he’d been delighted with the result. “He, um, made me read it aloud,” a self-conscious but equally delighted Dean told her. “You know, I never knew Object History was a thing. I thought history was all about learning dust-covered dates, or Taylor dressing us up once a year as his toy soldiers. But Mr. MacKellan says it can be about things, too, how we interact with the physical world and shape our experience around them, and it’s something I want to explore. Anyway, the guys in my class were really cool and they said they liked it. You too? Really?”

What Jess thought of the essay was not made public.

But Jess was not Dean’s only classmate. And it was no shock to Patty when she heard (via the Lane-Rory-Lorelei-Babette grapevine) that Mrs. Kim, upon her daily interrogation of Lane, had perked her ear at the news of Dean’s feat. Next thing he knew, Dean had been summoned to her Aladdin’s cave of 100% genuine Connecticutiana, handed a pencil and notebook, and told sternly, though not unkindly: “Now pick.”

“Um, sorry?”

“One of these. To write about. It’s good promotion, when the customer can be told about the antique's origin story. It helps with the “Deal of the Week”. Write.”

“But I’ve no idea who owned -”

“Thirty percent off the vintage Harley saddlebags. Cookie - one - and milk at four.”

“But, Mrs. Kim... wait, did you say thirty percent?”

“Twenty-five. The cookie is home-baked.”

(It was turnip cake, actually, but Lane came home in time to distract her mother and palm the slice.)

Writing, Dean found out, was a lot like like biking. You tripped; you wobbled; you found yourself gasping for breath up the interminable slope of finding the right word to match this jolt of sensation or that curt impact of truth. He picked a little rocking horse that waited in wooden patience (much like Mrs. Kim) while Dean browsed the Black-White-Read bookshop on toys, quizzed Clara on horses, cross-questioned his grandmother on rocking chairs, and wrote with a passion. Mrs. Kim struck out his Hunter S. Thompson quote (“Wow! What a ride!”) because she was Mrs. Kim and could spot a reference to Hell’s Angels a mile away, but greenlit the rest.

The little horse was upgraded to the front yard, surrounded with selected pieces of Dean’s piece written in Mrs. Kim’s beautiful cursive and glued on placards. It found a buyer not two days later.

“We appreciate doing business with you,” Mrs. Kim told Dean, and pointed him back to the storage room.

By the time Unicorn Day came up in April, the Stars Hollow Gazette had got hold of the Foresters’ phone number and relayed a special order for “a memento piece on the importance of porcelain unicorns in our town”.

“So you’re a thingster, Mister,” Lorelai told Dean at the next town meeting. Ever since shaking the dust of Doose’s off his feet, Dean had attended these from the back rows, where his tall form was less in evidence. On the B-side, the back rows doubled as the Gilmore Parterre.

Dean, who loved Lorelai, beamed back at her. “That sounds… very late Seventies.”

He’d waved, sincerely if awkwardly, at Rory when she’d slipped in after her mom. Going public, even in a classroom, even in a yard, had done Dean a world of good. He’d found his poise, Miss Patty reflected from her own centerstage seat, watching as Dean let Lorelai tease him in fond camaraderie and gave as good as he got.

Patty had a perfect ear - a requisite in her line of trade - and she used it to sift the next dialogue from Taylor’s inflated drone as he begged his audience for new festival ideas. In fact, her ear was so fine-tuned as to pick the other next dialogue, unspoken and unheard, but as familiar to her as a Woody Allen scenario.

RORY (leaning sideway to address Dean over Lorelai): A thingster. Wow. Who knew?

Who is that new you I never knew?

DEAN : Now you’re making it sound like something out of Monty Python.

This is weird. But weird-good. God, I've missed her. Missed her bright eyes. Bright with... interest?

RORY: Why, well done, Graham. No, I mean it. I mean, first Lane told me about your world-class essay...

I asked Lane about you.

DEAN: You asked Lane?

You didn’t ask Jess?

RORY: No. No, I didn’t, it just sort of… coalesced. In our talk. Like milkskin, if you’re the type who drinks hot milk outside of nursing homes. Um. Anyway, I told her about that time, when was it, when you said how much it sucked that they’d used “Blue Moon” in a Volkswagen ad.

It was the first night of the Autumn Festival at twelve past seven, it was the first time you came over to our house, into my room, it was our first close encounter, it was before Jess, please, please, please, remember it.

(Lorelai pretends to spot Luke, hits her forehead dramatically and rises, making mumbled don’t-mind-me-kids sounds. The seat between the kids remains vacant.)

DEAN: “Pink Moon”, it was “Pink Moon”. Oh, yeah. Guess I’ve -  changed my mind. Learnt to see things from a wider angle, you know?

I remember it chapter and verse, but this is the Jess Era and we're no longer those innocents.

RORY: What angle?

Are you ever going to look my way again?

DEAN: Um, it’s… it’s like I never really paid attention to things before. Or people, even. Like I looked at them through the small end of a telescope, and, well, that’s not fair. One thing I learnt is that things endure, but they have to change all the time to do that. Things and people. Take me and you, Rory. Once we got back together, all I did next was stand there with my arms dangling and let us happen, like, like what we had was an electric bulb that would burn forever. That's not how bulbs work! 

Yes, but only if I come back to you with a richer eye, one that will take in the sum of you. If I look now, while you’re chewing your lip - don't, you'll hurt it - all I’ll want see is last year’s girl. The girl who gave me goldfish kisses and Russian bricks to read. You’re not her anymore, and it won't be fair to you if I can't see that.

RORY: Yeah, I. I guess that makes sense.

When Jess and I talk books and music, we’re 100-watt soulmates. But when I try to talk about Grandpa's library, or Harvard, or our dads, or how Mom and I once dressed up as Elliot and E.T. for Halloween? Cue the power failure.

DEAN: Um, yeah. It does.

So. Jess not here tonight?

It's okay, Rory. See? I can say his name. I'm not last year's boy either.

RORY: Oh, no. No, he had - a thing.

I guess. 

Anyway. Are you gonna ask what I thought of your article?

Oh boy, I'm SO in the dark.

At which point Taylor hemmed “NEW IDEAS” loudly, glaring in their direction, and Miss Patty had an inspiration.

Chapter Text

She planned her next move with the same jubilant exactness she’d once put in her back flips and splits (once timed to John’s recitation of Howl, a night to remember). When it took place, the place was Luke’s café; the time a hushed blue Saturday night, when Luke would be at his most relaxed, yet most alert; and the main cast included herself, Luke, Taylor, Lorelai, Rory, Jess, Andrew, Archie, and a younger man in tortoiseshell glasses and a goatee drinking lemon iced tea in a corner. The other patrons formed a willing en masse audience.

“A Carnival of Things?” Taylor asked, scratching his own fuzzy chin. “I don’t quite see it, Patty.”

“I’ll light up your lantern, dear. Take my wraps. Have you ever seen me without one?”

“Perish the thought,” Jess muttered. He and Rory had agreed, with one-sided zeal, to hold private tutoring sessions. In the café, which made them public private tutoring sessions (Rory), hence an oxy-moronic venture (Jess).

“The answer is no, because I own so many. Some handspun, some repurposed - my red was cut out from the Palladium Ballroom’s old curtain - and one gifted to me by Tito Puente. The long silky one. He said it would remind me of his mambo.”

“Dirty!”

“I said mambo , Lorelai. In short, they express me. They always did, even when Sinjen and I shared a bedroom flat in the off-offest part of Broadway, happy days! and I spent the better part of winter with our cat wrapped over my shoulders to keep me warm.” She felt Jess haul his gaze up to her, before it slithered back to his page. Books were Jess’s cop-out to retreat from the onus of socializing, as they had been Rory’s - once.

“Now take all of us. We all have Favorite Things, things we cherish because they comfort and reflect us. Even the short-term, breakable ones, the flawed ones, the wabi-sabi that teach us not to scoff at our own limitations.”

Once again, still unwillingly, Jess lifted his gaze to her.

“So why not give them a day of praise?  Books, clothes, pictures…”

“Lava lamps,” Andrew said.

“Monkey lamps,” Lorelai said.

“Kill me now,” Luke growled. “Patty, no. I’m not turning this place into a petting zoo so everybody and their dog can fiddle with my dad’s pictures. Or my family musket.”

“Luke, sweetie” - before Lorelai could make good on her saucy grin.  “The only way anyone will blow your musket will be over my live body.”

(“Double the killing,” Jess muttered.)

“But those who like could display their Favorite Things in a special venue, and share tales and memories about them. And we could honour the town objects, too. We have a statue of Casimir Pulavski. Why? Why do we have a Pulavski statue, Taylor?”

Taylor, who hadn't the least idea, said, “Well, Patty, you might have a point.”

“We have red street benches up Blueberry Street,” Rory piped up, her eyes bright, “and blue benches down Red Currant Street.”

“We have a Swarovski menorah,” David Barans called out jovially, pushing the café’s door open. The doorframe let in a patch of sky above his head and shoulders, night-blue, with the first three stars proclaiming the end of Sabbath. “Evening, Archie. Everyone.”

“I see your Swarovski,” Archie said, smiling, “and I raise you my Nikki de Saint Phalle Black Madonna. That is, I was told it’s a de Saint Phalle. It has “Made in Pittsburgh” stamped under the baby Jesus’s bottom, but the donor’s belief was rock-solid, and who am I to trouble his faith.”

“So what’s all this about? Coffee, Luke, please.”

“Taylor’s new Carnival of Things - the older (and odder) the better. To give our material sidekicks some thanks and consideration.”

“Ah, the transfiguration of the commonplace.” David nodded, sitting across Archie. “I always said our Taylor was a mystic at heart.”

“I am not a mystic! And I’m still not sure about this. Would it draw attention? Would it draw crowds?”

“It might,” the man in the tortoiseshell glasses said. It was his first contribution to the talk. “Back in the Renaissance, the trendiest trend among the upper crust was the cabinet de curiosités, which was more or less what you all described.”

Taylor, predictably, ignored him. “Well, we do have a free slot in June, before the Start of Summer Madness launch. Patty, you may plan this.”

“Thank you, Taylor. But I vote that we hand this event over to the younger people.”

“The -”

“Our resident thingster,” Lorelai cried, snapping her fingers. “Of course! The very Dean.”

“Dean Forester? No! Out of the question! Out of the poll! Out of the mass interrogation!”

“Oh, but, honey -”

“None of your buttering and honeying, Patty. The boy is a resident disgrace. First, he broke his Rory vows, again -”

“No, he didn’t! He did nothing wrong. I did, I neglected him, I made our relationship all about me, and if I could -”

“And may I remind you all that he ditched me next? He forsook his Doose’s vows! And you want to put him in charge of a festival? A boy who cannot spot a career opportunity when he’s offered one on a silver plate?”

“He can, actually.” The tortoiseshell man set his cup down. “Dean intends to major in Cultural History next year and try for college. He has my vote - as does Miss Patty.”

“Oh, really?” Taylor turned about, his huff near-predatory. “And who exactly are you, my cultured friend? I don’t recall seeing you before.”

“Ogden MacKellan, History teacher. Jess can vouch for me - we’ve shared a classroom once or twice this month. Right, Jess?”

Jess, who had been staring at Rory, his face expressionless, blinked and said “Four times”. When Luke wheeled about from his sentinel stand at the percolator, Jess added, reluctantly,”I liked your John Cage impersonation.”

“Thank you. It was a once-in-a-career opportunity to have 4.33 minutes of silence in class. Miss Patty, could Jess work with Dean on this event?”

“Whoa, wait! I never said -”

“I’m ready to make it count as half of their final grades. And write them a recommendation letter, should they both consider college.”

“Hell, no! I -” Jess ducked his head under Mr. MacKellan’s suavely implacable gaze. “Sir.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. Dean Forester and Jess Mariano? Co-hosting a town feast? The town would never recover.”

Pat on cue, Luke wheeled on Taylor with toreador-like pugnacity. “Yes it would. Will. Patty, you’re on. I’ll polish that musket myself, lock, stock and barrel, and you” - pointing at a horror-struck Jess - “had better start taking notes. Rory can help you.”

“But, Uncle Luke...”

Patty sat back comfortably, meeting Lorelai’s baffled blue gaze across the room. “And that, Missy,” hers signaled back, “is how you choreograph a curtain-fall multiplayer ensemble number.”

Dean dove into the Carnival preparations with all of his hockey captain’s vim. And then some.

Already the days were longer, warmer, the first juicy watermelon had made its way to Doose’s, the Connecticut warblers were back from their posh southern resort and flying straight into summer. It was a time for zest and jollity, and Miss Patty was determined to milk it.

Some of it was spent instructing Dean on the noble art of fest planning. Dean, she found, had an A-1 head for budget. But then she expected no less of a kid who had built an entire Dodge Lancer, nose to tail, on Taylor-approved wages. And who now used his building skills to make her zany idea come true - with a little help from his friends.

Yes, his friends. Dean might have deemed himself a loner when he first arrived, neither ready nor willing to partake of community shindigs - much like Jess, really. But no longer. Because Dean had grown to love Stars Hollow. And now, at long last, the Hollowers were returning that love.

He won their esteem by asking to renege on his Chicago trip and let Clara go with their dad, so he could devote himself to the event.

He won over the little old ladies who were the heart and soul of these feasts, and whom he somehow convinced to dig out their grandmothers’ needlework and give them a second life by teaming up with Stars Hollow’s Tattoo Parlour. (A success. The local biker gang walked in as “those young people from Third Street”, walked out as “Hell’s Lovers’ Knots”.)

He won everyone’s eternal thanks by talking Kirk out of recreating Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece performance*.

(*Now starring Kirk, Kirk’s best shirt and underwear, and one strong pair of scissors.)

He won back Taylor’s heart by offering to cut down on costs and decorate the gazebo himself. The gazebo had been cast as an open stage, or confessional, where people would be free to step up and trade a story about their Favorite Things for a slice of Fran’s cakes. When asked what he had in mind, Dean grinned and said “Newspaper origamis. Rory’s idea - all it takes is a bit of sleight of hand”. Andrew donated the paper. Luke tried to donate Jess (not a success).

This Dean, Miss Patty told herself, had gone a long way from the boy she had decoyed on a previous festival day. The lost, the resentful boy, so bent on being “mad” at his rival he'd blinkered himself to any other perspective. He'd taken her light to heart, since, and he had made her proud. And she felt even prouder when, upon picking her phone for a little one-on-one with Babette, she found herself listening to a very different conversation.

“...lunch with Shira and Mitchum, so of course I told them about Rory’s Carnival of Things. Such a sweet concept, I said. So quaint and charming. Like that song, I said - doorbells and sleigh bells and schnitzel with noodles. Which was when Mitchum groaned, and I stopped talking.”

“He did? And you did? Wow, Mom, thanks for the tip.”

“Don’t be rude, Lorelai. It’s just that he doesn’t like that song very much. But Shira agreed that it was a perfect theme, and she’s got him to ring whoever’s in charge of Tonight in Connecticut. He said he would, too, if we kindly let him pass on the schnitzel and order steak. He likes his medium, with no peas and a smattering of -”

“Mom, does this conversation get a point at any time? Or a dot? Tell you what, I’ll settle for a speck if it gets us past the steak.”

“The point, Lorelai, is that I’ve arranged for a TV reporter to come and interview Rory and Dean.”

“... Did you just say Dean? Or was that Rory and Team?”

“No, Lorelai, that wasn’t.”

“Because it’s Dean and Team, actually. As Rory told you on Friday, he’s the boss of us.”

“Yes, yes, I know. She gave your father a copy of the Gazette and he was quite taken with Dean’s piece on the unicorns - said he’d never realized there was a local market for handmade porcelain insurance, and he may have misjudged the boy. But Rory’s helping him, isn’t she? I’m sure it will be a thrill to them, being together on the news.”

“Mom…”

“Dean is a very photogenic young man, and he can let Rory do the talking if he’d rather.”

“Mom! They’re no longer together! Didn’t Rory tell you? She’s hanging out with Jeez, these days.”

“Jess. Yes. I know. She brought him for lunch. Now, Lorelai, I gave Shira your number so the reporter would know who to get in touch with. I want you to arrange an exclusive interview for Dean and Rory, and be sure to tell the cameraman -”

This was when Miss Patty laid down the receiver as carefully as a newborn babe in its downy crib. Well, well, well. Trust Emily Gilmore to choose the lesser of two social evils when it came to a grandson-in-law.

Still…

Oh, but she did think it would be good for Dean to have his hour in the spotlight. And he was photogenic, tall drink of... soda that he was. He’d look good, if she or Lorelai could talk him into dropping the shapeless sports sweatershirt, no dirty intended. A suit, maybe? She thought of Sergio’s ties, laid to rest in some nook or other of her studio. She could never bring herself to give them away, unlike Sinjen’s Hessian boots and John’s anthracite turtlenecks. While Sergio hadn’t been her first, he’d been her warmest, kindest, until his great big kind heart had knocked itself out two days before their twelfth anniversary. She’d kept the ties because they’d bought them together when Sergio had launched his cooking show. He always cooked in a tie, same as Patty’s mother, Rica La Costa, had always baked in a hat - blue for pies, pink for paella.

Yes, she would give Dean the cream silk tie with the little squiggly pattern. He’d be needing one for Sookie’s wedding, anyways.

The studio’s door was ajar when Patty reached it. She never locked it - nobody who knew her in Stars Hollow would even think of pilfering her gym mats and beanbag seats - but she always closed it upon leaving. Light was pouring through the chink, and Patty wondered if East Side Tilly had dropped by for a nice cuppa or a good snoop around - with Tilly, the odds were good for either.

But it wasn’t Tilly sitting on her largest beanbag with a thoughtful face.

“Hello, Rory. Would you like a cuppa?”

Rory gave a start. “Miss Patty…”

“Hush, child.” Patty walked up to the chest where she kept some of the Interpretative Dancing paraphernalia; opened it and looked for the hidden compartment in the lid. Yes, there they were. She took the cream silk one and tucked it into her purse.

“I’m so very sorry, Miss Patty. I just - I needed a place to think, think deep, and my room wouldn’t let me.”

“Ah, yes. Wicked things, bedrooms. Too many memories.” Rory tensed perceptibly, and Patty chuckled in her throat. “No, honey, no story hour for you. Coffee, though?”

“Please.” The girl had relaxed again, letting her gaze wander around the studio. “These are nice,” she offered, her chin raised to the rows of black-and-white origami in various shapes - boats, cars, umbrellas, bow-ties, even small ice-creams cones - carefully stacked against the Carnival premiere.

“These are Dean’s. He said you gave him the idea.”

“Yes, but it really came from Jess. He even showed me how to make one - he knows a lot of tricks - but he wouldn’t do any for the feast, wouldn’t even let me say it was his idea. God! Boys! Why do they have to make everything so difficult?”

Miss Patty, busying herself in the refreshment corner, chuckled again.

“As in “Boys”, plural?”

“Yes! Why does Dean have to get so, so interesting again and, y'know, journalist-y, now we’re no longer together? And Jess, he’s funny and smart, but everything always has to be on his terms. If we go out, we go when and where he says, and it can only ever be the two of us. And then he’ll be sweet and things will click between us again, but the next moment he’ll bristle at something I said and dungeon himself. Or he’ll sneer at my Mom, or Luke, and -”

“And make it hard for you to like him.”

“... Yes.”

“But not hard enough that you’ll go back to Dean?”

“I…” Rory stood up, thin legs and blue gaze flailing in the dusk, until she paused and Patty, without turning round, knew which wall and which picture had arrested her.

“I miss Dean,” came under the girl’s breath. “I miss his lips. His fingertips, they had a way of giving little kisses to my cheek, Miss Patty, during the big kisses. I miss his smile. And I miss roaming with him at night, knowing that nothing bad can happen to me because he’s at my side, smiling, making that ridiculous impersonation of Gollum in The Bachelor. But I’m not his girl now. Only his friend. And what if we do get back together, and in a month, or a year, I hurt him again? Or we just drift apart, or something happens that proves we were wrong for each other in the first place? And then, there’s Jess. I like Jess. But Dean - ”

“Rory,” Miss Patty said, forcefully, because there was only so late Lorelai would let her kid roam at night before she got hold of the town loudspeaker and loudspoke them all out of bed.

“Gah! Why can’t I be good at this? ”

“Because you’re our very Sunday child, but there’s one lesson about love even the Sundayest girl must learn.”

Rory turned to look at her.

“It comes with giving up. Rory, sweetheart, even the Mr. Rights come with lacks and flaws in the design, and to love them is to put your arms around their gaps. So you can come back to Dean, who loves you, by the way, and you may find there’s plenty yet to explore about him. But you should not expect him to brush up his Shakespeare for you, because he wouldn’t be Dean if he did. Or you can choose Jess, and he may come to change over time, but I doubt he’ll ever be the boy you take to your grandma’s, to hold her chair and carve the roast for her.”

“I know! I made a pro and con list in my head, and -’

“And that’s very reasonable, but the heart has its reasons too, as somebody once said, some old French guy or Donna Summer, I never recall which. So choose from the heart.”

“But what if I choose wrong?”

“Rory, let me tell you a little something. I’ve been married four times - so far. And none of these choices was perfect. Sinjen was a drama queen. John wore socks in bed. (Turtlenecks, too, come to that.) Sergio’s heart was as big as the Ritz, but already on borrowed time when we met. And Sinjen, again… well, let’s not dwell on his comeback. But I wouldn’t take any of them back. They all helped me shape a life that’s mine. Unique, and richer than the red velvet cake in Fran’s window. Because, these choices? I gave them everything I had. And gave up what I couldn’t have, making them. So perhaps it’s time for you to be a giver. Or you'll end up the lady in the sequins, holding the flaming hoops for these boys to leap through, higher and higher and higher, until they simply can’t make it.”

Rory mumbled something for herself.

“What’s that, honey?”

“Then wear the golden hat, if that will move her -

If you can bounce high, bounce for her too,

Till she cry, Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover, I must have you! ”

“Hmmm. And once she does, and he takes a break from bouncing, then what? Up and leave him for a diamond-hatted fella? Ah, well. Drink up, sweetie, while I call your Mom.”

Rory didn’t answer, but she did pick up the mug.

May finally rolled over, and another nightfall came that was Carnival Eve.

Miss Patty took advantage of the Tushie Jog to check on the new town decorations. The gazebo was “all dolled up” (Babette) in origami; the town troubadour had added Prévert’s Inventory to his repertoire of oldies and could be heard chanting merrily one Henry II sideboard, two Henry III sideboards, three Henry IV sideboards ... The shop windows flashed a dazzling jackpot of things her way - things old and new, things borrowed, things colourful, while the Interpretative Dance group feverishly rehearsed a number entitled “Bernie On the Road”. The tattoo-and-needlework booth was flaunting its cross-stitched banner; the “Unicorn Souvenirs Through the Ages” booth was resplendent. Patty’s studio had closed its doors, but the walls inside now flaunted her entire collection of wraps and shawls, with vastly explanatory labels.

It was one of these evenings where everything in town felt a little fizzy and excited but right , the perfect mix of order and stamina, but with order topside - until Dean Forester threw himself right in front of her wheels, and Miss Patty had to slam the brakes home. The little lightweight train veered right, veered left, with a high-pitched clank, then settled.

“Rory!” Dean said, the sweat on his face gleaming in the streetlights. “She’s been in a car accident!! They said she’s okay, but...”

Miss Patty’s heart sank into itself, but she simply raised a hand - the one still holding the town megaphone.

“Jog dismissed! Jog dismissed! Everybody go home and meditate on their gluteus maximum.”

The next words were for Dean only. “Hop in, Dean-o. Where’s your truck?”

“Still at the airport - I lent it to Dad because my mom needs the car while he’s away.” Dean’s breath was bruised and cracked, and only then did she realize that he had been running all the way from Gypsy’s repair shop. More twos and twos hit their respective fours as she turned the train’s snout towards Stars Hollow’s hospital. Dean on his evening shift. Dean being there when they’d towed in Rory’s equally bruised and broken...

Her thoughts were held up when he caught at her arm. “Patty, wait! Stop the train!”

They were in a deserted area, with nothing standing in their way as she could see. But her empathy with him was such at this point that she braked again, as of their common will. She needn’t have bothered, though. Dean had leapt out at the first hint of slow, and she saw the fury in his stride, in his hands - balled into stony fists on each side of him - before she saw Jess. Jess’s thin form on the ground, folded on itself, his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands.

The show business had made Miss Patty privy to many a tomcat fight. None of them had ever made her feel like this - as if the sky overhead and every streetlight had called it a night and gone black. This could get really, really bad, really fast.

Then Jess raised his face from his knees.

And Dean’s fists slowly lapsed back to hands.

She couldn’t hear what Jess said. His voice was low, and the blood was pounding in Miss Patty’s ears, the adrenaline belatedly kicking in. But she could see his face, vulnerable and somehow made younger by moonlight, while he spoke. When he was done, he looked away, briefly; and when he looked again, he blinked. Dean had one hand held out before him.

Dean said exactly five words. This time, the rush in Miss Pitty’s ears had abated enough that she, too, heard them. She waited, her foot on the brake, and she watched Jess’s face turn from wary to vulnerable again, as he took Dean’s hand and rose to his feet. The boys hovered, facing each other; uncertain; both taking in the absence of any pre-written script for them.

Then Dean motioned to the train. And when Jess took an uncharacteristically small step, Dean waited for him.

When Jess stepped into the first coach, Dean followed and took the seat opposite him.

(“I would have swerved too” was what he’d said.)

The front desk girl had been her pupil once upon a time, which secured them three seats in the waiting-room, but not much more. None of them was family, and Lorelai, who was, had commanded a battery of extra tests for Rory. Nothing to be done but wait those out. For some things are in our power and some aren’t, to quote another old (French? Greek?) guy, or perhaps Maria Callas, whose no-words-minced masterclass Patty had attended in '71.

The adrenaline was on a spin down. Dizzying, and she had to close her eyes. Both the night’s excitement and the night’s fright were tipping her into recovery sleep, as thick and dark as Luke’s best cocoa. When she emerged from its depths, Patty felt too muzzy to open her eyes. But she could hear Jess talking next to her, and this was enough to keep her afloat a bit more.

Still low-voiced, but, as far as she could tell, a quiet, earnest low. He was telling Dean about the first book he’d owned, that hadn’t been a library book or one forced upon him by a bumbling do-gooder. A book that had chosen ten-year-old Jess because it was slim enough to be tucked under his mattress, where Liz’s Flavour of the Month wouldn’t find it and use it to roll his joints. The book was called… but sleep’s slippery slope was too much for Miss Patty, and she sank right under again.

When she resurfaced, the boys had somehow charmed the nurse into finding them a newspaper, and were bickering soft-voicedly on the best way to make a car origami.

Both shut up instantly when the man in a white coat came up to them.

“Miss Patty? Thought I’d recognized you. I’ve just seen to Rory’s arm."

It was to Patty’s credit that her first words were not “I’d recognize you anywhere, handsome” but “How is she?”

“Well, she's endured a tiny fracture in her wrist, but nothing a cast and a fortnight’s patience won’t fix. The young man she was with” - the doctor’s gaze executed a diplomatic glide between Jess and Dean - “did the right thing in calling us straightaway. Rory’s fine, really. She’ll be down in a minute.”

Miss Patty caught a motion in the corner of her eye. It was one difficult to miss - it was Dean standing up. Standing tall, if a little stiff after the long waiting. He was still holding the near-complete origami in his hands and, as they watched, he folded the last fold carefully, then dropped it on Jess’s lap. His hand touched Jess’s shoulder, before Dean turned to her. “I’m going home,” he said. “My mom will be worried.”

“I’ll drive you, then. Jess, do you -”

“Rory’s coming down,” the handsome doc said. A beat. His tone unchanged, but his gaze flicking to her. “With her mother.”

They all paused, taking in the Lorelai factor. Jess made a half-motion to get up from his seat only to flop back into it, his face paler in the hospital’s icy light. He took a long, silent breath, before he raised his chin. This wasn’t his signature cocky upnod. It was the gesture of a boy who knows that punishment is coming his way, and falls accordingly into a routine of self-bracing to take it.

She made herself look at Dean, whose own eyes were on Jess. Oh dear. Perhaps it had been too early to hope - perhaps it was human, only too human, that Dean would want to watch his rival get a taste of his own medicine. Or was Dean pausing to see if Jess would ask for help? Would beg one of them to stay and play mediator between Lorelai and him? Jess?

“Dean…,” she began, at a loss for words.

But Dean was sitting down again, his hand again on Jess’s shoulder. 

“Guess I can stay a bit more,” he said.

Miss Patty loved festival nights.

They came with a special animation - as if the feast, a still life of crepe paper and fairy lights, was suddenly sparked with life. People came and went on the town square, crocodiles of giggling children, high school students in twos and threes, laughing, calling out to one another. The sweet scents of apple sangria and hot waffles filled the air. The booths were alive with customers. Taylor, looking regal in a purple waistcoat, had climbed onto the pedestal of Casimir Pulaski’s statue and was giving a speech, one arm thrown around George Washington’s saviour.

There was already a queue to Miss Patty’s “And That’s A Wrap!” exhibition, but she gave herself another  minute, just so she could wink at the MC. There he stood on the gazebo, waiting for Taylor to finish so he could introduce the first speakers who had come to praise their favorite things. He wore Sergio’s tie, to Patty's pride and joy, and he looked quite the lad in it. She chuckled to see him adjust the knot a bit self-consciously, then grin at Mr. MacKennon’s thumbs-up.

Then she looked further down the square, where two people were making their way forward.

They had come separately, but it was obvious that they were both headed to the gazebo. Rory’s left arm was in a sling, but her good hand was holding a small medallion, its leather string hanging from her fingers. Jess, coming up from Luke’s diner, had a book in his hand - slim, shabby, clearly much-read and long-kept.

Dean, looking up from his tie, saw them and smiled.

Miss Patty couldn’t know what the next hours had in store for them. They would converge on the gazebo, and she still recalled how that story forked in two - how the lovers of old had, or had not, found each other again in starlight. There was no telling here. Not from her, that is. They would have to write their own story - all three of them - one way or another.

(Together, even. Maybe. Not that much of a shocker for a Broadway broad.)

It didn’t really matter. What mattered was Dean, grown and pacified. Dean centerstage, Dean tonight's man, his adoptive town beaming approval on him. Dean happy. Dean waiting for them to come to him.

Dean - never again not enough.

Miss Patty gave him a buoyant little wave, then, smiling too, turned again into the crowd.

'Cause there may be times

When you think you lost your mind

And the steps you're takin'

Leave you three, four steps behind;

Though the road you're walking

Might be long sometimes,

You just keep on trekkin'

And you'll just be fine.