Never Good Enough | Gilmore Girls

𝟏𝟒: 𝐂𝐮𝐫𝐬𝐞 𝐘𝐨𝐮 𝐃𝐨𝐧𝐧𝐚 𝐑𝐞𝐞𝐝

"Hello?"

That was Dean walking inside the house.

Thea would've gone to one of her friends' homes, but there was an awful flu that had gone around in school and almost all of her friends, except for Lane, had gotten hit by the flu, along with a few others.

It seemed awful, with throwing up and shitting.

So, Thea was stuck at home with these people.

After a small bit of back and forth between Dean and Lorelai, Dean finally came into the living room.

"Hey," Rory greeted him.

"Hey," Dean replied.

"Hi," Thea greeted.

"Hi," Dean replied awkwardly.

"Sit – you're missing it," Lorelai told Dean.

Dean made his way over to the other side of the coffee table, and he asked, "What are we watching?"

"The incomparable Donna Reed Show," Lorelai said.

Rory looked at the paper bag, "What's in there?"

"A salad for me and breadsticks for Thea," Dean said.

Rory seemed confused, "Salad?"

"Yeah, it's a quaint dish sometimes used to precede large quantities of pizza," Dean teased. Lorelai and Rory gave him weird looks. "It's for me."

"Clearly," Rory said.

Okay, sure, Liberty was a vegan due to Luke instilling 'red meat can kill you' and healthy living in her. And they had all their weird food quirks: Sage with his using a can opener to open a can of soda to irritate everyone, Georgia always ordered the same food no matter where, Liberty always poured milk in the bowl first then the cereal, Thea with the way she eats toast and how she doesn't like soup because she didn't like drinking food, and then there was the way that Aiden always press his mashed potatoes out, make rows in it, and put in corn. Then he'd mash it all together until it was shaped like a cake, then slice it up and eat it like that. Apparently that drove his aunt and uncle crazy seeing that and it was a thing that Aiden did when he was a kid.

So, Thea didn't judge Dean for wanting to eat salads. It was a strange hill for Lorelai and Rory to die on.

Dean handed Lorelai a box of pizza and asked, "So, who's Donna Reed?"

"What?" asked Rory.

Lorelai asked, "You don't know who Donna Reed is?"

"She's an actress from the 50s," Thea told him.

"Actually, she's the quintessential fifties mom with the perfect fifities family," Lorelai explained to Dean, who dug his salad out of the bag.

Thea rolled her eyes, but Dean handed her the breadsticks that he got her.

Rory added, "Never without a smile and high heels."

Lorelai added, "Hair that, if you hit it with a hammer, would crack?"

Dean asked, "So it's a show?"

"It's a lifestyle," Rory added.

"It's a religion," Lorelai finished.

It's my sanity slowly slipping away, Thea thought as she took a bite of a breadstick, tuning Rory and Lorelai out. She looked at Dean. Yeah, it was weird that Dean didn't have ranch in his salad, but whatever, weird food quirks.

"I don't know – it all seems kind of nice to me," Dean said.

Rory asked, "What does?"

"Well, you know, families hanging together," Dean said. "I mean, a wife cooking dinner for her husband. And look – she seems really happy."