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Lorelai takes her to the appointment. It’s a Wednesday morning, three days after the wedding. In the car they listen to NPR and everyone on Morning Edition sounds lost, bewildered, as they discuss the Trump transition, try to suss out what happened the night before.
“Good thing you didn’t get knocked up three months from now, Kid,” Lorelai says, but neither of them laughs. It’s a cold, bright day and they ride the rest of the way to Hartford in silence.
They haven’t really discussed Rory’s decision. Not yet. In the Gazebo on Sunday morning she’d shared her plan: a medical abortion, the appointment already made. With her life so untethered still, her career in flux, a baby just doesn’t make sense. Lorelai had said okay, had given her a hug and stroked her hair, and offered her a ride. She hadn’t even asked about the father, though Rory could tell she was dying to.
It’s Logan, of course. That night in New Hampshire, the thrill of Life and Death Brigade hijinks still coursing through her blood–she’d been impulsive, un-careful. She’d slipped. But that’s a door she’s closed, locked. She gave back the key, both literally and metaphorically.
She’d been in the middle of a pro/con list when she called her dad. (Pro: I have a support system. Con: I have no job. Pro: I haven’t touched Gran’s trust fund yet. Con: I’m focused on the book. Pro: It would make for great material. Con: That’s a shitty reason to have a baby, Rory.) She’s not sure what she wanted from him. Some assurance that it was okay to raise this kid alone? A clue about how Logan would respond to the news? Either way she had left...dissatisfied.
Logan lives in London. He’s getting married. Those things are easy to write into the Con column. She knows that a baby would just look like a trap to the Huntzbergers. That Mitchum and Shira would see their grandchild as nothing more than a desperate act, a way for her to sink her claws into the legacy they hold so dear. She thinks about the way Christopher’s parents, her own blood, looked at her and she doesn’t know the right words to write that feeling down. She doesn’t think she could do that to a child.
The office is cold and she shivers in her paper gown. Lorelai flips through an old People magazine in the plastic chair next to her and cracks jokes about the “Who Wore it Better?” pages while they wait for the doctor to come in. She flips through a pamphlet on Mifepristone and Misoprostol, reads the list of side effects carefully. An hour later she leaves the office with a box of generic maxi-pads, a prescription for antibiotics and an appointment to get an IUD.
“What do you want to listen to?” Lorelai asks in the car.
“Anything except NPR.”
Lorelai turns the Hamilton soundtrack up as loud as it will go.
Rory doesn’t eat dinner. She feels queasy and unsettled, alternates between lying in bed and lying on the couch. She goes for a walk, sits in the gazebo for awhile. The wedding decorations have all been taken down, Stars Hollow is itself in fall again, all pumpkins and leaves and twinkle lights. When she gets home Lorelai and Luke have already gone to bed. She thinks about going upstairs, kicking Luke out for the night, but they’re newlyweds, it wouldn’t be fair. She stays up with a hot water bottle watching Lifetime movies on the DVR instead.
At three am Lorelai comes downstairs. “Can’t sleep?”
Rory shakes her head.
“Scooch.”
She lifts her legs so Lorelai can settle in next to her, then sets them in her mother’s lap.
“Want to talk about it?”
Rory doesn’t say anything for a long minute. “Do you think I’m weak?” she finally asks.
“What are you talking about?”
She nestles deeper into the couch and pulls an afghan across her stomach. “That I couldn’t do this, be a mom.”
“You’re not weak.”
“I’m twice as old as you were. Most of my friends have kids. What does it say about me that I run scared at the idea?”
“It doesn’t say anything about you.”
“You know I never thought about having kids? Ever? When Lane and then Paris got pregnant it just felt so...different from everything I could imagine in my life.”
Lorelai tugs at the corner of the afghan until it unfolds enough to stretch over both of them. “You don’t have to want kids, Rory. And you don’t have to make my choices. God, I raised you in the hope that you wouldn’t make my choices.”
“I know that.”
“Really?”
“Intellectually I know that. I still have the impassioned defense of Roe v. Wade that I wrote in fifth grade.”
“Yeah, that was a fun parent/teacher conference.”
Rory takes a deep breath and then winces at the sharp pain of a cramp. “I know I made the right choice, I do. I just also know that if you had made this same choice I wouldn’t be here.”
“Kid, I needed you.” Under the afghan Lorelai wraps her hands around Rory’s socked feet and squeezes. “I was desperately seeking an exit plan from my pre-ordained life and you appeared on the scene. I wouldn’t change my decision for the world, but that doesn’t mean I made it for the right reasons.”
Rory nods and swallows. “I made a pro/con list,” she says.
“I figured you did.”
“It’s long. Twelve pages.”
“Sounds about right.”
“There are only eight things on the Pro side.”
“Rory, you don’t have to convince me. I promise you’ll get no judgement here.”
Rory sits up, winces again. “I talked to Dad, too.”
“Really?”
She nods. “I went and saw him last week. I just...wanted his perspective.”
There’s a quick glimmer of hurt in Lorelai’s eyes, then it fades away. “You told him you were pregnant before you told me?”
“No. No, I didn’t tell him anything about that. I just told him about the book.”
“Oh.”
“I just wanted to know...I asked if...I think I was trying to figure out if it was fair to do it on my own. To have a kid and not involve the father.”
“Not tell him at all?”
“No, I would have told him, if I’d gone through with it. But...it was always me and you, you know? And Logan is...he’s on a very different path.”
Lorelai nods. “So…”
“Yeah.”
“I knew that Didi was trouble.”
Rory hits her across the shoulder with a throw pillow.
“I think that not having a child with a man who lives on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean is the right decision, Ror. Especially since he’s about to marry someone that’s not you.”
“I know.”
“And I think, you know, raising you the way I did...I didn’t always make it easy for Chris, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t have opportunities to be a part of your life.” Rory nods. “Sometimes it was a very thin line between protecting you and depriving you. And I hope I got it right most of the time, but it was always a crapshoot.”
Rory curls against Lorelai’s side, rests her head on her mother’s shoulder. “You know I loved the way you raised me, right?”
“I know, Kid.”
“That’s why I’m writing the book. I have no plans to Glass Castle you.”
“I know.” Lorelai wraps an arm around her. “I really am okay with it, Rory. I want you to write it.”
Rory nods.
“So,” Lorelai says, “it may be an out of character suggestion, but maybe we should turn off the Lifetime movie.”
Rory feigns a gasp.
“Not that we shouldn’t pick Cradle of Lies back up at some other point in time, not least to find out if Deputy Doug gets what’s coming to him, but for tonight how about something a little lighter?”
Rory shifts closer to her mother. “Julia Child?” she asks.
“Sounds perfect.”
Lorelai pulls The French Chef up on the Roku and Rory takes a deep breath in. She is still cramping and still nauseated, but she doesn’t feel as restless as she did this afternoon.
“Mom?” she asks.
“Yeah.”
“I love you.”
“Love you, too, Kid.”