Lara Jean Covey and Stormy

Lara Jean Covey and Stormy’s friendship is a bond of affectionate mentorship whose meaning comes fully into view after Stormy’s death: Lara Jean remembers her not only through vivid personal details, but through a guiding principle of choosing love and adventure. At Belleview, Lara Jean gives that bond a public form, making a memorial that preserves Stormy’s stories and lets her friends share in the remembrance.

A Friendship Built on Stories and Recognition

Lara Jean’s memories of Stormy are intimate and particular. Stormy taught her how to apply red lipstick so it would last through a night of kisses and champagne, and her advice was inseparable from the spirited life she had led. She joked that she still felt as if she were in her twenties, sometimes dreaming she was young while her former husbands had grown old. Waking in her older body surprised her, she said, though she insisted she still had “the gams, though.” Lara Jean remembers that claim with fond certainty: Stormy had them.

The friendship also appears in shared creative and social rituals. When Lara Jean and Peter Kavinsky consider Halloween costumes, the choice of Tyler Durden and Marla Singer from Fight Club originates with Lara Jean’s best friend, Chris, who is watching the film with Lara Jean and Kitty Song. Lara Jean initially hesitates because Marla is not Asian and Lara Jean has a policy of choosing costumes based on Asian people. The plan comes together when Peter’s mother finds a red leather jacket and Trina Rothschild lends Lara Jean clothes from her own wardrobe. The episode does not establish that Stormy is part of the costume preparations, but it places Lara Jean’s choices about representation and friendship alongside the confidence and self-expression associated with her wider relationships.

A Lesson That Extends Beyond the Nursing Home

Stormy’s influence is not limited to personal style or reminiscence. When Lara Jean imagines working in Colonial Williamsburg, she wonders whether the attraction might be limited by historical reenactment’s expectations about race. Margot Song answers by pointing to Phillipa Soo, who is half-Chinese and played Eliza Hamilton, and encourages Lara Jean to imagine herself churning butter in period dress. The exchange makes visible the questions of belonging that Lara Jean brings to ordinary decisions: whether she will be welcomed, and whether she can claim a role that does not seem designed with her in mind.

A related concern surfaces in Margot’s advice about college. Margot recommends that Lara Jean make her own friends, find her people, and join the Asian association, recalling that studying in another country left her without an Asian-American group. She describes finding racial identity in college as an important experience, using Tim Monahan as an example. These moments broaden the account of Lara Jean’s social world, but they should not be mistaken for Stormy’s direct advice: the evidence presents them as exchanges with Margot, while Stormy’s most explicit lesson is recalled at the memorial. Together, however, they show Lara Jean navigating identity, community, and the courage to choose a life for herself.

Death and the Return of Earlier Grief

Lara Jean learns that Stormy has died in her sleep through a text from John Ambrose McClaren, Stormy’s grandson. The news leaves her stunned because Stormy had seemed fine the last time they met. Lara Jean cries so intensely that she struggles to breathe and see, and she cannot settle on a response to John. Her first attempt at offering help seems inadequate; she then writes that Stormy had the most spirit of anyone she had met and that she will miss her dearly. John replies that he knows Stormy loved Lara Jean too, an assurance that confirms the affection was mutual.

The loss also reopens Lara Jean’s memory of her mother’s funeral. She recalls being nine, with Margot eleven and Kitty only two, sitting beside their father as he cried silently with Kitty in his arms. Kitty kept telling him not to cry, not understanding what had happened beyond his sadness. Lara Jean remembers the day as the first time she felt that nothing was safe anymore. Stormy’s death therefore brings together grief for a friend and the older pain of losing her mother; Lara Jean says she is crying for Stormy, her mother, and everything.

Stormy had wanted Lara Jean to transcribe her memoirs under the title Stormy Weather, but they never got around to it. After her death, Lara Jean worries about how anyone will know Stormy’s story. This unfinished project gives the memorial a particular importance: although the memoir was never written, Lara Jean can still tell a story of Stormy’s life aloud, drawing on remembered scenes and the recollections of others.

The Belleview Memorial

Margot helps Lara Jean find a way to honor Stormy by suggesting a memorial at Belleview for the residents and friends who could not travel to the funeral in Rhode Island. Lara Jean agrees that Stormy would like the idea. Margot cannot attend, but her proposal gives Lara Jean a practical response to grief and a reason to return to the nursing home where the friendship took shape.

Lara Jean prepares the gathering with careful attention to Stormy’s tastes. Instead of wearing black, she chooses a sundress Stormy once praised, white with cornflower-blue forget-me-nots embroidered on the skirt, and pairs it with white sandals and lacy gloves found at Bygones, a vintage store in Richmond. She imagines Stormy appreciating the gloves, which recall the cotillions and Saturday-night dances of her youth. Lara Jean leaves Stormy’s pink diamond ring unworn because she wants its first appearance on her to be at prom, as Stormy would have wanted.

The room, too, is assembled from remembered pleasures and familiar household objects: a punch bowl, a crystal bowl of peanuts, cherry-embroidered cocktail napkins from an estate sale, and the Coveys’ Thanksgiving tablecloth. Lara Jean puts roses on the piano where Stormy used to sit. The punch is made with ginger ale and frozen fruit juice because some residents cannot drink alcohol with their medication, but she sets champagne beside it for anyone who wants to add some. She also plays Frank Sinatra, whom Stormy had said should have been her second husband. The preparation makes remembrance tangible without pretending that the gathering can reverse the loss.

The people who arrive include Mr. Perelli, Alicia, the receptionist Shanice, Janette, and Mrs. Armbruster, whom a nurse wheels in; Mrs. Armbruster has dementia and had once been friendly with Stormy. Lara Jean notices that Belleview has changed while she was away: residents have moved in with their children or died, and fewer staff members are familiar to her. The memorial is thus also a return to a place altered by time, where a small group gathers around a person whose absence is newly felt.

Telling Stormy’s Story

Lara Jean is nervous to speak. Standing before the group, with her knees shaking, she fears stumbling and failing to do Stormy justice. John arrives just as she is about to begin, dressed in a pressed button-down shirt and khakis, and takes a seat beside Alicia. His encouraging smile gives Lara Jean a familiar face in the room; his own grief is visible later when he wipes his eyes.

Lara Jean opens her speech with Stormy at eighteen, in the summer of 1952. Frank Sinatra is on the radio, Lana Turner and Ava Gardner are the starlets of the day, and Stormy is in the marching band, has been voted Best Legs, and has a date every Saturday night. On one date, with a boy named Walt, she goes skinny-dipping in the town lake on a dare. When a farmer calls the police and officers shine their lights on the water, Stormy refuses to come out until they turn around. She gets home in a police car. Mr. Perelli laughs in recognition and confirms that she never could turn down a dare; another guest adds that this was not the first or last time. Their responses transform Lara Jean’s prepared account into shared memory, and the laughter helps her relax.

The story then becomes a statement of what Lara Jean believes Stormy’s life meant. She calls Stormy a force of nature and says Stormy taught her that love is about making brave choices every day. Stormy, in Lara Jean’s telling, always chose love and adventure, treating them as one and the same. The speech does not soften the fact of death; instead, it gives Stormy’s next adventure the shape of a farewell. Janette starts “Stormy Weather,” and the song carries the memorial from spoken recollection into music.

Afterward, John brings Lara Jean two plastic cups of fruit punch and jokes that Stormy would surely have wanted them spiked. They clink cups to Edith Sinclair McClaren Sheehan, the name Lara Jean learns is Stormy’s full name. Lara Jean finds it strikingly serious beside the cocktail-loving, daring woman she remembers. The toast gathers the memorial’s central contrast into a final exchange: a formal name and an irrepressible persona, private affection and communal remembrance. By telling Stormy’s story at Belleview, Lara Jean gives the uncompleted memoir a living counterpart and carries Stormy’s lesson forward in her own account of love and courage.