Hello, Goodbye

Chapter Five

Elsie Collins had been a gifted artist. She was a loving wife. A doting mother and grandmother. And a bit of a hoarder. When Emersyn woke up the next day to another cold shower, she decided to go digging in the garage in the hopes of finding the reason the water wasn't getting hot. She didn't know too much about home repair, which was surprising, seeing as Kiel was a professional house flipper and landlord. But she was hoping all she had to do was flip a breaker or something. She opened the door to the garage and was shocked to see the mountains of boxes and other things that she had somehow missed the day before when she'd pulled her bike out. Her grandma had never wanted to throw anything away, much to her grandpa's frustration. She had insisted that she needed everything she collected for her art. And that may have been true. But now, as Emersyn stared at the piles of useless junk, she didn't see the treasures her grandma had seen. She only saw a mess.

"Great," she mumbled to herself as she turned away from the garage and headed back to her room to put on a pair of old ratty jeans, a holey t-shirt, and a pair of sneakers. She had hoped to spend her day walking about town. Catching up with some old neighbors. Maybe applying to a job or two, if only to keep Kiel off her back. But now, after seeing the disaster in the garage, she knew she wouldn't be able to focus on anything else until the job was finished. So, after changing clothes, she made her way back to the garage and cracked open her first box.

Between cooking gadgets her grandma had never used but had gotten secondhand at thrift stores or yard sales, stacks of books on gardening, art, and local town history, and old records still packed carefully in their sleeves, Emersyn knew she had her work cut out for her. After stumbling upon some mouse crap and a decomposed corpse of some creature that looked like a rat, she decided it would be best to put on some gloves. So she made a trip to the local hardware store to pick up some protective gear before returning in the hopes of finishing the job.

But it didn't take too long after that for Emersyn to realize there was no way she'd get it all done in one day. This was going to be a project that would probably take her several weeks to finish. A good chunk of it was trash, but there was some of it she thought was in pretty decent condition. She'd have to make a trip to the church in the next few days to talk to the pastor about a church sale. Her grandpa would love that, even if it would kill her grandma all over again to see her precious treasures in the hands of someone else. After all, a skillet could be a hat for an engineer. And that fireplace poker could be used as an arm. Come on, Emersyn, darling. Open your eyes. That's what her grandma would've said to her. But her grandma wasn't there. And there were better uses for these things than just sitting in the garage collecting dust or mouse turds.

At about three in the afternoon, as she was sifting through a box of old books ranging from mint condition to totally destroyed, she stumbled across an old journal. Confused, as neither of her grandparents had ever mentioned anything about journaling, she flipped open the first page and felt her heart sink into her stomach. The first page of the journal said, Property of MT. MT. Emersyn stared at the words on the page, knowing in her heart that she was holding a book full of words Makayla Townsend, now Makayla Collins, had written in. Her mother. From the before times. Before the abandonment. Before the death of her dad. Maybe even... maybe even before her.

She debated with herself for a moment on whether or not she should even open it. After all, her mother was still alive, and she might not take too kindly to her daughter reading her old journal without her permission. She considered putting it back in the box where she found it and forgetting about it completely. But the pull was too strong. She had to know. And so, with slightly quivering fingers, she flipped the first page and began to read. The first several pages were written in pencil, so they were difficult to read. But flipping a few pages, she found some words written in ink.