Extra-16
Making things right- ver 2"Jung Changmin get over here!"
Jaejoong and Changmin look up from their respective desserts and glance up the stairs, waiting for more. When nothing follows, Jaejoong turns to her son. "What did you do?"
"Nothing this week."
"It's still Tuesday." Jaejoong points in the direction Yunho's angry voice bellowed, enough of a command for Changmin to scamper upstairs before his dad came looking for him.
He finds his father standing in the hallway radiating the "you're dead" aura, scary enough to make him gulp. "What the hell is that?" His father points to his left where the door to the study is ajar.
Changmin is clueless till he timidly peeks in the study. Whoa! Did he do that? He knows he dumps all his extra stuff like the old game consoles and broken keyboard in there. He used to barely enter the room or look where he's putting those things. Just open the door enough to fit his arm and the object and drop the things in the room. Yeah, well… he can see what happened.
It started when his father said he could keep the books he was done reading in the study. When he asked where, Yunho told him to keep them wherever he wanted. So it's really his father's fault.
But Changmin will not risk the peril of telling his father that. "Clear your clutter." Yunho directs him before walking to the bedroom. Jaejoong follows a minute later, shaking her head at the mess. "Remember baby, 'sparkjoy.'" Jaejoong laughingly offers her son a suggestion before excitedly following her husband. The door of the bedroom closes and Changmin would rather not know what goes on behind those soundproof doors.
He's got his mess to clean up. He decides to put away things for now and clean up the rest tomorrow. He stacks the books on his father's desk and piles the clutter that needs to be thrown away in a corner.
As for his old but still useable gadgets, he thinks storing them in something for now would be better. The old boxes behind the desk look ideal.
But he's disappointed when he finds the boxes filled with his mother's old stuff. There’s nothing but sketchbooks and old albums inside. He remembers his grandmother going through these albums to find pictures they could display around the house.
There weren't enough of his other grandmother though. So Jihye had framed the sketch Jaejoong had drawn of her mother.
Among the sketchbooks and albums there was one notebook. It looks like an old journal and could belong to his mother's or grandparents.
Extremely curious, Changmin takes the book and the box it was in to his room. After shutting the door, he inspects the book.
To his mild disappointment it's barely used. There's random doodles, grocery lists and a handful of recipes, but the pages are mostly blank. He's better off checking out his mother's drawings.
But as he's shuffling through the pages, he comes across a folded piece of paper. It's old and yellowed but still in visibly good condition. Nonetheless he unfolds it delicately. He panics a little when a tiny bit of paper at the edge crumbles and falls.
But when he reads the words "To my Jaejoongie" at the beginning of the letter, his attention is on the letter. He knows now that this would be prying. But he doesn't know anything about his maternal grandparents or his paternal grandfather. And he has a feeling this letter has to do with his mother's parents. He simply wants to know about them.
Changmin first hides the box under his desk in case his parents check on him later. He'll return it sneakily in the morning when he cleans the stuff out of the study. Getting comfortable in his bed, he turns off the lights, sticking with the bedside lamp to read the letter.
He first reads the sign to find out who it's from. The words, "love you always, Umma." Tells him it's the grandmother he never knew. Now he's feeling a little conscious that he might be prying too much in his mother's past. But he's unable to resist this piece of his grandmother.
He reads the contents, learning his grandmother had heart disease too and wrote this around the time she found out about it. Changmin rubs his chest over the shirt instinctively now th
Comments