Elsie
Chapter Forty-Four
Iwas stupid to think I could slip seamlessly into a brand new life without any obstacles.
One of the most urgent being the balance on my checking account, which was dwindling down to nothing.
Will fed and caffeinated me. But even with all those massive expenses lifted, it was glaringly obvious that I couldn’t sustain this life for much longer.
I’d paid for the rental until mid-December, three months from the date I arrived, because I thought working on a time crunch might help to motivate me.
But now, with just weeks to spare, I was scrambling for options of what to do next, being both penniless and unemployed.
I couldn’t tell Will, because he would want to fix it, and no matter how well things were going between us, I couldn’t drop the bomb that his girlfriend of three days was practically bankrupt.
Thinking it over, my plan had never made any sense in the first place. I was supposed to come here, write a manuscript, and prove to myself that I had it in me to do what no one in my life thought me capable of doing.
Finish something. Follow my own path. Create something for myself by myself.
Stupidly, I assumed that following my dreams could lead me toward a life that might not quite be what my mother envisioned for me, but still successful in its own way.
Part of me had some delusional idea that maybe I could present her with a finished story and say, look, I did this. Are you proud of me now?
But as I read it over, I realized how ridiculous I’d been all along. Why would my mother care about a silly novel? How would that make my rejection of her carefully laid out plans for my life any less obstinate?
Her friends’ children were lawyers and CEOs, and doctors. They had drive and ambition and focus and all the things she’d always reminded me I lacked.
And she was right. I was twenty-six years old, damn it, with absolutely nothing to show for it.
“Stupid, stupid, stupid,” I said, ripping pages from my notebook of meaningless fluff. “No one is ever going to want to read this. All I did was waste my time.”
And as someone in their twenties, wasting time was just about the scariest thing in the world.
Second only to the sound of your door flying open while you stare at it, helpless and unmoving, wondering if maybe Michael Myers really was real after all.
“Geez, lady, you don’t look so good.” The man walked into the kitchen, staring at me skeptically as he made his way toward the fridge.
My heart only stopped its erratic pounding when I realized it who it was.
“Geez, lady?” I gasped incredulously. “You threw my door open like a maniac, Wayne. What are you doing here?”
“You know I come to mow the lawn every now and then.” He sighed, as if he was tired of explaining simple concepts to the strange new girl.
“Does the grass even grow in November?”
“Nope.” He grinned cheerfully. “But Will pays me every two weeks anyway, God bless him.”
“Why?”
“I just think he likes helping people out.” He shrugged, opening my fridge to pull out a soda. “God knows a lot of us in this town need it.”
Yeah, I could see that. Everyone needed Will. Even I needed him, pathetic as it sounded for someone who’d only just met him.
But what did he need? And how could I ever give it to him if I was a broke, penniless, washed up writer without a career, or even a plan going forward?
“I’ll tell you what,” he said, sitting down at the kitchen table across from me. “The two of you surprised me, but now I sort of see how it makes sense.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, Will’s always been such a rigidity, uptight type of guy, you know what I mean? And you seem, well…no offense or anything, but kind of flighty.”
I groaned.
“But I think you’re good for him because of that.”
“You do?”
“Sure. I don’t think it would’ve done him any good to end up with a girl too much like himself.” Then he laughed at the idea. “Hell, imagine that. A girl like himself would’ve just brought him down. Not you, though. You bring him…”
“What?” I leaned forward, desperate for confirmation.
“Well, you liven him up a bit. That’s all.”
“Thanks.” I huffed half-heartedly.
“Except now,” he said, frowning as he looked me over, “you don’t look so cheery now. What happened?”
“I’m failing at life, Wayne, if you must know.”
“Cheers to that.” He snorted, taking a sip of his Coke. “Join the club.”
“That wasn’t encouraging,” I groaned. “I thought you might tell me something like, ‘No, Elsie, your life isn’t falling apart. You’re perfectly fine, and fun, and so young and full of time!’”
“If you say your life is falling apart, who am I to tell you otherwise?”
“I’m just feeling hopeless because I’m broke. I guess my mother was right about money being able to buy happiness.”
“Money is freedom.” Wayne nodded along, more focused on the condensation on his soda can than my words.
“Do you have any suggestions for me, then?” I asked, because yes, I really was that desperate.
“Uh, sure.” He nodded. “Maybe ask Will if he’ll pay you to mow someone’s yard. Just not this one. I have dibs.”
“I don’t have money for next month’s rent, Wayne. I hardly think a yardwork gig is going to be my salvation.”
“Well,” he shrugged, “that’s all I got.”
“I’m chasing a pipedream, Wayne,” I admitted, resting my head sideways on the table as I lamented over my woes to my unofficial landscaper. “I thought I could be a writer, but now I realized that even if I finish this stupid manuscript, no one is ever going to want to read it.”
“No one, huh? It’s that bad?”
“I don’t know. I guess I wrote it more for myself than an audience, and now I can’t imagine anyone else who might be invested in the fictionalized drama of my life.”
“Can I ask you something?” He leaned forward and didn’t wait for me to nod before he said, “If even one person read your manu-whatever—”
“Manuscript,” I added.
“Right. That. If even one person read it and got excited about it, wouldn’t that be worth it?”
“Well.” I mulled it over, thinking of a finished work with my name on it, the product of a lifetime’s worth of dreams in my hands. “Yeah. I guess it would be.”
“Then, why can’t that one person be you?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, even if no one else likes it, or even reads it for that matter, if it’s something that made sense to you, then what’s the harm in seeing it through?”
“What if it never makes me any money?”
“Not much in this world ever does. The question is, are you writing because you love it, or are you writing it just to make a buck?”
“I love it,” I told him honestly. “I definitely love it.”
Subconsciously or not, I poured so much of myself into it, and knew that at any point in the future I could pick it up and be transported back to this specific period in my life. That was the power of words. The magic of writing that I’d always loved so deeply.
“Then,” he said, standing from his seat, “keep doing what you love. A happy life is better than a rich life, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, you think so?” I stared at him hopefully.
But Wayne just shrugged and headed for the door.
“How would I know? I’m thirty six and live with my mother.”
Despite my best intentions, I laughed.
“You tell Will I cheered his girlfriend up.” Wayne pointed a finger and a thumbs up in my direction. “Maybe he’ll throw me an extra few bucks.”
When he left, I sat down and wrote, filling pages of my notebook with everything that had been building up inside of me.
Some of it was good, some of it was decidedly less than, but the important thing was, I wasn’t doing it for anyone else.
I was only writing for me.