Both Sides Now

by Shawn Inmon

  Rick came over and asked, “Who sent you those?”

  “I have no idea.”

  He narrowed his eyes in disbelief. Rick often thought I was seeing someone else. “Is it someone from your work? A customer? Who?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t see a card.”

  Without another word, Rick walked out of the house, slammed the door behind him, got in his car, and peeled out down Damron Road. Mom glared at him for rattling her windows but didn’t say anything. Mom and I searched the arrangement in vain for a card.

  She looked at me and asked “Do you know who sent them?”

  Unbelievable. No one believes me.

  “No, I really, truly, absolutely, no-doubt-about-it have no idea who sent me this or why.”

  I thought maybe someone would call and tell me they had sent them, but after a few hours it was as big a mystery as ever. When Rick got back, he was determined to solve it. “Come on,” he ordered. “We’re going to go find out who sent you those flowers.”

  We drove to the florists’ house and knocked on their door. When they answered, I said, “Hi, you delivered some flowers to me this afternoon, but there wasn’t a card with them. Can you tell me who sent them?”

  “I remember. I didn’t put a card with them because the person who sent them wanted to remain anonymous.”

  “So, you can’t tell us who sent them then?”

  “Technically, I really shouldn’t. However, if you want to guess, I’ll tell you if you are right or wrong.”

  Mysterious flowers arrive out of nowhere. Rick is so pissed I can see steam coming out of his ears, and this guy wants to play Twenty Questions. “Can you just tell me this? Is it someone local here, from Mossyrock or Morton?”

  “They were definitely not from around here, at least not anymore.”

  As soon as he said that, I knew. “Shawn Inmon.” He nodded and smiled an odd little smile.

  I looked at Rick. I thought he might be even more pissed, but he actually seemed to relax a little. I guess he thought that flowers from an old boyfriend I didn’t talk to anymore were a lot better than having a secret admirer in town.

  “It was one of the oddest things I’ve ever seen,” the florist added. “He came strolling into the shop today wearing a cape, an eye patch, and using a cane to walk.”

  I blinked. I almost laughed, but I held it back.

  Rick couldn’t help himself. “What? Are you kidding me? That’s hilarious. What a freak.”

  “Is there anything else I can help you with?”

  “No, thank you,” I said as we walked back to Rick’s car. When we got back to Mom’s house, I told her what the florist said.

  She shook her head, annoyed. “I don’t know what we’re going to have to do to get him to leave you alone and quit causing trouble for you. He’s done enough to hurt you, but it seems like this is becoming a habit with him.”

  “I know just what to do to take care of it,” Rick said. He grabbed the roses out of the vase and walked out the front door.

  About ten minutes later, he came back empty-handed. “There. I think that’ll do it.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I took the damned flowers back to him and told him that he had done enough to ruin your life already. I told him to quit bothering you by calling or sending you flowers or whatever.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said he wouldn’t bother you anymore.”

  I didn’t see him or talk to him again for more than twenty-five years.

  Again

  January 5th, 2007

  Shawn came through the drive-through again. I was working another double ACS/Bill & Bea’s shift.

  “Hey, Mom,” Connie said. “Your boyfriend’s here again.”

  I almost didn’t look, because she was in the habit of saying that to alert me to some ancient, toothless guy, or a customer who had last bathed when Bill Clinton was president. Tonight, though, she pointed to the car idling in the second position in the drive-through. It was Shawn, sitting in a silvery-blue Jaguar. I’m not exactly a car nut, but I recognized the hood ornament.

  He had been on my mind a lot since he had appeared out of nowhere. I wasn’t mooning over him, for sure, but seeing him had stirred up a lot of memories. He had been the boogeyman in my life for so long that I didn’t even bother to question it anymore.

  I tended to think of him while driving. Shawn had taught me a few things about driving, like how I shouldn’t brake in the middle of a curve or how to change lanes on the freeway without hitting any of the little bumps. Now, I thought of him every time I did exactly the opposite of what he had taught me.

  Music had been central to the way Shawn and I had expressed our feelings. The songs we had shared remained so linked to him that they always took me back in time. In fact, when I was alone, I had taken to talking to him when our songs came on. It wasn’t sappy ‘Oh, I miss you’ sort of talk. Instead, when a song like Baker Street by Gerry Rafferty came on, I could swear I would hear his voice in my head saying something like, “Do you remember where we were when we heard this song the first time?” My usual response wasn’t very romantic or wistful. It would be something like ‘get the hell out of my head, you freak.’

  Shawn had also shown up in my dreams ever since he’d left me. He was part of a recurring dream, in which we played something like a grownup game of hide ‘n seek. Sometimes we were in Mossyrock, sometimes somewhere else, but Shawn was always looking for me, calling me. When I was younger, I hid from him in my dreams because I felt like Mom was looking over my shoulder, about to ground me. Later, the dream had evolved. I dreamed I was hiding from him because I was ashamed of my life and I didn’t want him to see me the way I was.

  And now, here he was again, driving his beautiful car and wearing a wedding ring in the rundown little drive-in where I was finishing up my second shift for the day. That was great.

  When he pulled forward, I opened the window and looked at him.

  “You’re not going to freak out on me again, are you?” he asked.

  A quarter of a century, and he still had not located a filter. I would call it unbelievable, but I’d be kidding myself. It was completely believable that, in all this time, he still hadn’t learned not to blurt out the wrong thing.

  It pissed me off but good. The last time he had come through, he had said, “We went to school together,” as if that was all I had ever been to him—a school friend. Now, here he was again, sitting in a rich man’s car and obviously living the good life, making fun of me in that smug, superior way that made me want to throw a ketchup bottle at him. Instead, I dialed my tone down to absolute zero.

  “No, I’m over that now.” To finish giving him the full picture, I pulled out my order pad, manufactured a wintry smile, and said, “Can I help you?”

  He looked like I had slapped him. There had been a little twinkle in his eyes when he first pulled up, like we had been old friends who just hadn’t seen each other in a while. Now, he looked like I just stole his puppy.

  “Um, OK, I guess I’ll have a chicken sandwich and a medium iced tea.”

  I made a note on my pad, said “I’ll get that right out to you,” closed the window and walked back toward the grill area. I knew that Shawn was watching me wherever I went, so I made sure that I was extra sweet to all the other customers. I wanted him to know it was just him I didn’t like, and not everyone else.

  When his order was bagged up and ready to go, I walked back over to the window. I had one hand on the bottom of the bag to balance it. Shawn reached out and cupped my hand with his for just a moment. It was a gesture of familiarity. I pulled my hand away.

  “That’ll be $8.76, please.”

  He handed me a ten and said, “It’s really good to see you, Dawn.”

  I made his change and handed it to him. “You too,” I said, giving up nothing. I closed the window and turned away.

  I’m not sure what I expected from him, but whatever it was, I hadn’t gotte
n it. I guess I wanted him to show me that, at least a long time ago, I had been important to him. Instead, I got “We went to school together” and “You’re not gonna freak out on me, are you?”

  After twenty-seven years, I thought I deserved more than that from him.

  Hold on Tight

  January 2009

  It was 10:00 on a Monday night, and I was sitting on the couch waiting for the news to show the rest of the week’s weather forecast. Life had gotten a little better. Dani, my fifteen-year-old younger daughter, and I were living with a man named Aaron. I had met Aaron a year and a half before, and liked him well enough. From a practical viewpoint, being in a relationship with someone to help share the bills made things more comfortable. I didn’t love him, but I hadn’t been in love in so long I was pretty sure that part of me was permanently disabled.

  I had been able to quit working the second job at Bill & Bea’s, but was still working at ACS. We were living in Chehalis and ACS was in Tumwater, twenty miles north. The weather forecast would give me some idea how miserable my commute might be the next morning.

  My cell phone rang and I saw it was Connie.

  “Hey, what are you up to?”

  “Hi. Um, I have to tell you something about Dani.”

  “What, she’s pregnant?” I asked with a laugh.

  “Yes.”

  “What?!?!”

  “So you knew already Dani was pregnant? She didn’t think you knew.”

  “No, I didn’t know that Dani was pregnant! I was joking. Oh my God.”

  My hands were shaking as I said, “I’ve gotta go. I’ve got to call Dani.”

  When Dani answered, her voice told me that she had been crying. She had been a rebellious girl all her life, but right at that moment she sounded small and scared. I was still reeling and had no idea what to say to her.

  “Hi, baby.”

  “Hi.”

  “I love you, Dani. We’ll get through this. I don’t know what the answer is, or how we’ll make it work, but we will.”

  We didn’t talk much longer. There wasn’t anything else to say.

  Dani had been a handful from her terrible twos onward. There was no way she was ready to be responsible and be a mom. She was just too young. I thought about her boyfriend, Daniel. He was a sweet boy and I liked him, but even though he was a few years older than Dani, he wasn’t mature enough to be a dad.

  Sleep didn’t come for a long time that night. My thoughts kept going in circles, but there didn’t seem to be a good solution. The obvious answer was an abortion. They just weren’t ready to be parents, and I didn’t know if I had it in me to raise another baby while I worked fulltime.

  I remembered my own experience and stopped cold. Mom had told me that she was stopping me from ruining my life, but as I looked back on it, since that decision everything had gone bad. I had never had a truly happy time in my adult life.

  A few days later I invited Dani and Daniel, plus Connie and her boyfriend Jamie, over for dinner. Dani and I hadn’t talked much more about the big news. I wanted to have everyone over for dinner and play a board game, so that we could have a relaxing evening together. It didn’t work out that way.

  We were playing Aggravation, and the game lived up to its name when Connie and Dani got into an argument. I honestly didn’t know what they were arguing about at the time, because they were sisters and they were always arguing with each other. I learned to tune it out years ago unless it came to blows. Unfortunately, this was one of those nights when their arguing escalated. With so many emotions running just under the surface, all it took was for one of them to say something minor and the fight was on. I ended up having to separate them before they killed each other. By then, all those emotions had boiled out well above the surface.

  “I know you want me to have an abortion,” Dani said, looking at me. “I know you want to talk to me about options, but it’s not going to happen. I’m going to have this baby and there is nothing you can do about it.”

  That set me back. When I was her age, I had believed everything I had been told, and in the end I did what I was told. When I was fifteen and pregnant, my mom had manipulated me into getting an abortion. Her reasons resembled my own grounds for thinking that an abortion would probably be best for Dani. Yet deep inside, in a place I didn’t talk about with anyone, I had regretted it ever since.

  My mom raised me to do as I was told, always. It hadn’t worked out for me, and for that reason, I raised my girls to question everything—to think for themselves. I achieved that. Here was the living proof, staring defiantly back at me, telling me that she was going to keep her baby.

  Nothing else had changed. She was still too young. She would have to change her whole life in order to be a mom to this baby. But that was her decision, not mine, and she had made it. I was proud of her. I hugged her and said, “OK. It’s up to you.”

  “I know it is.”

  She was still defiant, but I knew the decision had been made. There would be no more talk about options.

  After the Love has Gone

  Almost five months later, things were moving along. I still wasn’t happy about Dani’s pregnancy, but I was proud of the way she was preparing for motherhood. She was settling down, focusing on things like school and preparing to be a mom, instead of hanging out with her friends and partying. Although I was mad at Daniel when I found out Dani was pregnant, I was proud of him too. He had a full-time job and he worked hard. He called me and tearfully promised me that he would always take care of ‘his family.’

  Earlier that week, Aaron had gone to Hawaii on vacation with some friends. I’m sure I should have been upset that my live-in boyfriend went to Hawaii without me, but I wasn’t. It was nice having a break from him. That should have clued me in to the fact that I was happier with him gone than with him there.

  About mid-afternoon, around the middle of my shift at ACS one day, Connie called my cell phone. She knew I was at work, where I tried not to take many personal calls, so my heart lurched a little. Things were just settling down, and I prayed it wasn’t bad news.

  “Hi. I’m at work.”

  “I know, but I think you want to know about this. The people who own Bill & Bea’s were checking around on the Internet to see if there were any reviews anywhere. You will never believe what they found. Do you remember when that guy came through the drive-through a few years ago and you freaked out a little bit?”

  “Yeah. Why?”

  “He wrote a story about it, and I think you’re going to want to read it. He says he’s still in love with you.”

  “How do I find it?”

  “Just Google “Bill & Bea’s” and look for a website called Writing Raw. Click the link and it will take you right to it.”

  “Crap. We don’t have access to anything but email at our workstations. Too many agents were checking their Facebook status and not working, so they disabled it.”

  “Well, maybe you can check it on the computer when you get home. Just thought you’d want to know that there’s some weird dude running around out there that thinks he’s in love with you. Bye!”

  I could do that, of course. I could finish my work like a good little worker bee, take a leisurely drive home, have dinner and sit down to read what my first love had written about me. Whatever. Patience was never my strong suit.

  I went to Jake, one of the Operations Managers at ACS. “Can I borrow your computer for a minute?”

  “What’s wrong with your computer?”

  “Nothing’s wrong with it. It just can’t access the site I need.”

  “What do you need to get online for in the middle of a shift?”

  “I know it sounds weird, but someone wrote a story about me and I want to read it.”

  This seemed to amuse him. He smiled and gestured toward his computer. “Help yourself. I’ll go get a cup of coffee and then I’ll be back. Print it out if you want.”

  I sat down at his computer, went to Google, and typed in “Bill & Be
a’s.” Sure enough, one of the first results that came back was from a website called WritingRaw.com. When I clicked on the link, it took me directly to a story titled December, 2006, by Shawn Inmon.

  The first line of the story read, “It had already been a very long day, but I wasn’t in any hurry to get home to Enumclaw.” I hit ‘print’ and it started to roll off Jake’s printer. I thought it might be just one or two pages long, but paper kept coming. When I pulled the last sheet out of the printer, I saw that the last line of the story was, “My body was in 2006, but my mind, spirit and heart were firmly lodged in the 1970’s.”

  I closed out the window just as Jake came back. He was still smiling a little and looking amused. “Find what you need?”

  “Yes, thank you.” I hurried back to my own workstation and sat down to read.

  It was basically the story like I remembered it, but I thought he had made himself look a lot smoother than he actually had been. Then I saw that he wrote that he loved me, and that he had always loved me. I didn’t believe that. I guessed Shawn was finally getting around to fulfilling his dream of being a writer. He was probably stuck for an idea, so he took something that really happened—running into an old girlfriend—and wrote a fictionalized story around that. He had even changed his own name. He called himself “Scott Mitchell” in the story, but he left my name in, which ticked me off.

  At the same time, the things he wrote in the story were what I would have loved to have heard from him when he came through my drive-through. I would have liked to have known that I had been important to him once, even if it was a long time ago. Instead, he had said, “We went to school together” and “You’re not gonna freak out on me again, are you?” It felt like he was using me all over again, using what we had left of our relationship to write a fictional story. That just figured.