How Gilmore Girls Do Money: Dave Rygalski

After Dave sees the Facebook status update — “Dear friends and family, I wanted to let you know that Zack Van Gerbig and I have separated” — the messages start coming more frequently. Lane, reaching out to him as if their old relationship could provide the receptacle for the feelings she couldn’t share in front of her mother or her children.

He responds to some of them. He knows there’s probably a way to turn read notifications off Facebook, but until then he knows that Lane knows when he’s online, when he’s read her messages, when he’s started to type a response and then stopped, unclear of his role in this story.

“Just tell her you’re sorry this is happening,” his wife said. “Divorces are hard.”

Dave had the phone in his hand, wishing he could trade it for the book on his nightstand, but he had started answering emails, and one of the emails included a Facebook notification, and there he was back inside the app again, with all its little red numbers demanding his attention. All the people who want to talk to him or want him to know that they liked his company’s latest video advertisement. He knows there’s probably a way to stop getting those emails.

“And tell her she’s still a good mom,” his wife said.

Dave had reflexively hit “like,” earlier that week, on a picture of Lane’s twins dressed as Minions. The year before that, the family had gone as the four Beatles, Yellow Submarine-era, with costumes that Lane’s friend Lorelai had helped make. This year the costumes came out of an Amazon box.

“You’re going to be okay,” he typed. “You’re still a good mom.”

His kids had a nanny. It was one of the ways he couldn’t quite fathom Lane’s life, the perpetual autumn of back-to-school signs and bake sales and dance marathons. That might have been his life, except he moved to Los Angeles and married a television producer. Neither he nor his wife had to quit their jobs after the kids arrived.

If he had married Lane, especially as young as Mrs. Kim had wanted them to get married, it could have been him getting divorced right now. It could have been him taking pictures of kids on the front porch before going to wherever Zack worked — it wasn’t still the diner, was it? — and coming home to a sink full of dishes and a wife whom he had once loved.

They were going to be rockstars, he and Lane. He remembered when losing that possibility felt like he had lost everything.

Dave put his phone down. “I love you,” he told his wife, and kissed her.

Previously on “How Gilmore Girls Do Money:” Liz, T.J., and Doula

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