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  Both Sides Now

  By Shawn Inmon

  Author of the Bestselling Feels Like the First Time

  Both Sides Now

  By Shawn Inmon

  ©2013 by Shawn Inmon

  All rights reserved.

  This book or parts thereof may not be reproduced in any form, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without prior written permission of the copyright owner and/or publisher of this book, except as provided by the United States of America copyright law.

  The views expressed in the work are solely those of the author.

  Cover Design: Linda Boulanger

  www.TellTaleBookCovers.weebly.com

  Interior Design: Ellen Sallas, The Author’s Mentor

  www.theauthorsmentor.com

  Published by Pertime Publishing

  Also available in print

  PUBLISHED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  .

  Dedication

  This book is dedicated to Sheilah Galpin, Bonnie Powell and Jessica Coen.

  When things were dark, you were the light.

  .

  This is a True Story

  .

  Table of Contents

  Just When I Needed You Most

  Never Going Back Again

  Oh, Very Young

  Wouldn’t It Be Nice

  Thank You for Being a Friend

  Wonderful Tonight

  Love is in the Air

  You Should be Dancing

  Always and Forever

  I Just Wanna Stop

  Magnet and Steel

  Every Time You Go Away

  Living Inside Myself

  Hold the Line

  Tonight’s the Night

  I’m So Afraid

  Love Hurts

  Wish You Were Here

  Comfortably Numb

  Again

  Hold on Tight

  After the Love has Gone

  Because the Night

  Falling Slowly

  Beautiful Boy

  Grow Old With Me

  At Last

  Just the Two of Us

  How Much I Feel

  Afterword –Love Will Find a Way

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Just When I Needed You Most

  February 1979

  The instruction sheet had said not to eat breakfast. That was good advice, because when Dad turned into the parking lot of the Planned Parenthood building, I started to feel sick to my stomach. He found a parking spot by the front door of the building, turned to Mom and said, “I’ll wait here.”

  She nodded at him, and we got out and sloshed through the puddles and rain to reach the double glass doors. There was a waiting room inside, with uncomfortable chairs and benches and a lady sitting behind a desk. A rack held pamphlets with helpful titles like Sex and the Adolescent. If I hadn’t been so queasy, I might have laughed at that. Instead I couldn’t manage anything but a grimace.

  Mom walked up to the lady behind the desk and said, “We have an appointment. It will be under Dawn Welch.”

  The lady checked her appointment log, nodded, and handed Mom a clipboard with some forms. “Fill these out, please.” Mom sat down and scribbled for a few minutes, then handed me the clipboard and a wad of money. I took both up to the lady behind the desk and handed them to her.

  “Just a moment. I’ll get your receipt.”

  I said “Thank you,” sat down, closed my eyes and pretended I was somewhere else. Anywhere else. I was afraid I was going to throw up all over the clean tile floor.

  A few minutes later, a nurse in a white uniform opened a door and said, “Dawn? Dawn Welch?”

  Never Going Back Again

  December 1, 2006

  For as long as I could remember, life had been a merry-go-round that never slowed down enough for me to catch my balance. I had separated from my husband Rick a few years earlier. Since then, life had gotten better, but things were still hard. I worked two jobs, trying to keep me and my daughters Connie and Dani afloat. Even with two jobs, we were slipping below the waves. The worst part of every day was going to the mailbox. I was behind on the mortgage on our little house and the bank was constantly threatening to foreclose. I paid my utility bill every month the day before it was shut off. If we lost the house, I didn’t know where we would go next. My mom and dad had both passed away and I didn’t have any other family nearby.

  I worked as a Supervisor at a Call Center for ACS in Tumwater. As a Supervisor, I had two jobs. One part I loved: I trained a team of twelve agents to be as successful as they could be. They handled calls from people that were unhappy about their Verizon Wireless bills. You can imagine how much fun that was. It was when a customer was really angry that the part I didn’t like came: Supervisor calls. I knew eventually I would have as much as I could take and I would tell some customer exactly what I thought. No doubt, that would be my last Supervisor call and my last day working for ACS.

  In the evenings and on my day off, I moonlighted part-time at a little hamburger stand in Centralia called Bill & Bea’s. The work was pretty boring, but Connie worked there too. No matter how bad things were, she could make me laugh. I liked working at B&B’s, mostly because it meant I got to spend time with Connie.

  On December 1st, I got up at 4 AM and worked a full shift at ACS. I was exhausted and daydreaming about taking a nap before my shift at Bill & Bea’s that night. Sometimes the promise of a nap is what got me through my shift. It rarely happened, and today was no exception. Something always needed to be done.

  By 8:30 that night, I was pretty much dead on my feet, but there was still half an hour before closing time. As Connie and I were starting our closing procedures, making sure everything was cleaned, filled and ready for the next day, another car pulled up to the drive-through window.

  I was filling the sugar dispensers on the counter, so Connie opened the window and took the order. I heard a man order a chicken sandwich and a Coke. I was glad he didn’t have a huge order that would make us late getting out of there. As tired as I was, I had a date to go to the new casino in Rochester. I wasn’t excited about the guy, but I was kind of over needing to be excited about a guy before I went out with him. Anyway, a trip to the casino sounded like more fun than wiping down countertops and filling ketchup bottles, or being called terrible names by someone who hadn’t monitored his kid’s cell phone usage and wanted to curse someone else for it.

  “Hey, Mom,” I heard Connie call from behind the grill. “I forgot to ask him if he wanted onions on his sandwich. Will you check?”

  I slid the window open and leaned out. The driver looked like he was in his mid-forties, with short brown hair, resembling about a hundred other guys that came through the drive-through every day.

  “Do you want onions on your sandwich?” I asked.

  For some reason, this relatively easy question didn’t seem to register with him. He blinked and opened his mouth like he was going to answer, but nothing came out. Finally, he managed one word: “Huh?”

  I slowed my speech down for him a little bit, in case he was, well, slow.

  “I just need to know if you want onions on your sandwich.”

  After another long moment, he finally stuttered, “Yeah, sure.”

  We made all our food fresh to order, so it took time for Connie to make his sandwich and cook his fries. She noted that the slow-witted driver was staring at us. The customers could see right into the kitchen from the drive-through, but when the window was closed, they couldn’t hear us.

  “We’ve got another one, Mom,” Connie said. “I think he likes you
.”

  For some reason, a lot of guys think the drive-through is the perfect place to launch their pickup lines.

  “Yeah, well, I think he’s kinda cute.”

  “Eww, gross, Mom. He’s old!”

  I laughed. Eighteen-year-old girls don’t think any guy in his forties can be cute, other than maybe Johnny Depp. I looked at him more closely and saw that he had his left hand out the window, with a wedding ring on it. Whatever interest I had in flirting with him evaporated.

  I took his sandwich and fries and put them in a brown bag, folding the top over so the food would stay warm if he didn’t eat it right away. I slid the window open and handed it through to him.

  “That’ll be $8.66, please.”

  He looked a little dazed, but gave me a half-smile and handed me a ten-dollar bill. When I gave him his change, he had an odd expression on his face, like he’d seen a ghost.

  “Did you go to Mossyrock High School?” he asked.

  “Yes...”

  “Class of ’82?”

  “No, Class of ’81.” I stared at him harder, trying to place him. It wasn’t unusual for someone I went to school with to recognize me at the drive-through, since we weren’t that far from Mossyrock, but most people who did were a year or two behind me. He didn’t look like any of the underclassmen I could remember.

  He eased the car forward, like he was going to just drive off. I wasn’t about to let him get away that easy. “And you are…?”

  “We went to school together,” he said.

  I searched my memory but I was coming up blank. I gave a small shake of my head, feeling a little helpless. I hated it when someone recognized me and I had no clue who they were.

  “Dawn, it’s Shawn.”

  I could tell he thought that would end the mystery, but it didn’t. Maybe it was the exhaustion of having been awake for nineteen hours, but whatever the reason, I wasn’t making a connection. I bit the inevitable bullet.

  “Shawn who?”

  That struck home. He had clearly expected me to remember him, but I just didn’t.

  “Shawn Inmon. We lived next door to each other…”

  I don’t know if he kept talking after that, because I wasn’t able to hear any more. There was a sudden ocean’s-roar in my ears that blocked out everything else.

  Shawn.

  I had buried everything about Shawn so deep that I was sure it would never resurface. I thought I would never see him again. Now here he was, right in front of me. The last I heard, he was married, had kids, and had moved away. His mom had never missed a chance to tell me he was happy. Memories and emotions churned through me, and I was helpless to stop them.

  I took a step back and my hands flew to my mouth.

  “Oh my God. Oh. My. God. OhmyGod.”

  Somewhere deep inside, I knew I was losing it, but I knew that from a distance, watching myself freak out. I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t do anything. I was vaguely aware that Shawn was still talking, but I couldn’t hear what he was saying. That rushing noise in my ears was blocking out everything else.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Connie walk over and smile at Shawn. He was talking to her. Shawn is talking to Connie. Does he think she’s his? If he does the math, he should know she’s not. I was rooted to one spot, chanting “Oh my God.” I didn’t know if I would ever be able to stop repeating that. Memories flooded through me. I remembered laughing, talking, playing catch in our yard. I remembered dancing barefoot after Prom, soft kisses and feeling so safe in his arms. I was always safe when I was with him. Then I remembered that he left. He left and never came back.

  I had tried to locate him off and on over the years, but I never found him. I didn’t want to talk to him, mostly because I didn’t want him to know how my life had turned out, but I wanted to know where he was and if he was doing well.

  He and Connie eventually finished whatever conversation they were having, and I saw his car ease forward. He took one last look at me over his shoulder before he turned right onto Harrison, headed toward I-5.

  “Mom, are you OK?”

  I looked at Connie and finally found the ‘off’ switch for the constant repetition of “Oh my God.” I nodded a little, but was having a hard time focusing.

  “Who was that?” Connie asked.

  “That was my first.” Connie’s eyes widened. I didn’t have to explain.

  My brain started to work again. He had said, “We went to school together.” Was that all I was to him? A classmate he left behind while he went on to bigger and better things?

  “We went to school together,” I mumbled, shaking my head. “I guess Mom was right. I can’t believe that’s all I was to him.”

  I still had salt and pepper shakers to fill and tables to wipe down while Connie cleaned the grill. I was supposed to meet the guy who was taking me to the casino in just a few minutes, but I had forgotten all about him.

  All I could think about was the feeling I’d had when Shawn and I were together. I should have been getting ready to go, but I felt like I was stuck in the 70s.

  Oh, Very Young

  My life story was almost very short. I was born in Torrance Memorial Hospital in Torrance, California on December 27th, 1963. A lot of things about my birth are still mysteries to me, but I know I arrived with quite a few health problems. At first, the doctors diagnosed me with a heart defect. They were wrong about that, but I had other issues for them to deal with. The woman I eventually came to know as my mom told me many years later that my birth mother died giving birth to me. Like so many things, I don’t know if that was legend or truth.

  What I do know is that I was given to Colleen and Burt Decker as a foster child when I was three weeks old. The state wouldn’t allow me to be adopted because I was so sickly. I think they were trying to save Mom the expense and heartache of adopting a baby girl who was just going to die anyway. Happily, the state was incorrect, and Mom legally adopted me in 1967. We lived in a little three-bedroom house on a cul-de-sac in Carson, California, right behind the Carson High School football field.

  During that time, Mom was a foster parent to lots of kids. That meant there might be as many as six or seven foster kids living with us. It was like growing up in a preschool that had no other permanent students. For the longest time, I didn’t have my own bed. I can remember being tired and asking Mom where I was sleeping that night. Sometimes it was two kids to a bed, but it didn’t bother me. It was kind of fun and it was just the way life was. It all felt very normal.

  When I was three years old, Burt Decker molested me. I’m not going to say any more about it, but it is part of who I am and it never goes away. When I was four, he moved out with one of the older foster kids, a sixteen-year-old girl. I never saw him again.

  Over the next year, several other men came and went in our house, but only one stayed around long enough to make an impression. Mom told me that I should call him ‘Dad.’ Then they had a fight one night. She woke me up, told me to kiss him good-bye and that he wasn’t my dad any more. I never saw him again. I was five when a man named Walt showed up. He stuck around. It wasn’t long before he and Mom were married, and he really was my dad from then on.

  For the most part, growing up in my mom’s house was a happy experience. After all, she had picked me out of the never-ending river of foster kids and decided to keep me. I didn’t know it at the time of course, but she had not led an easy life. She had married young to get out of a bad situation at home and went straight into a worse one with Burt Decker. He was controlling and violent toward her, although she managed to protect the kids from most of the bad stuff.

  We never had a lot of money, but Mom was very creative about coming up with ways to have fun. I remember a birthday sleepover where she invited twelve girls over, which was way more than we had room for. Because my birthday is so close to Christmas, she assumed that most of them wouldn’t be able to come. Fourteen girls showed up. She built a ‘campfire’ out of logs and Christmas ligh
ts. The next morning, we all piled into the van to go get donuts. Every time we came to a red light, Mom would yell “Chinese Fire Drill!” and we would all cascade out and run around the van like little maniacs, laughing and tumbling back into our seats when the light turned green.

  There were a lot of kids my age in the neighborhood. We played Red Rover, Hide ‘n Seek, Red Light, Green Light or baseball all day, and then had sleepovers at each other’s houses at night. This being Southern California, the weather was always warm and I had a year-round tan. Disneyland and Knott’s Berry Farm weren’t far away, and Mom and Dad took me whenever they could. Then there were the beaches. My big brother Brian was a surfer, and I loved it when he would take me to the ocean with him and I could watch him surf. I was a California girl in every way.

  Toward the end of sixth grade, Mom took me on a vacation to see my sister Shari, my niece Lori and my nephews Ed, Dane and Danny in Onalaska, Washington. We spent a week there and I went to school with Lori and her brothers. I loved her school. In Carson, there were a thousand kids in my grade. In Onalaska, there were only thirty. Mom seemed to like it too, because when we got back to California, she started talking about moving to Washington.

  Mom was more about action than she was about talking, so she put the house up for sale and started packing. By the time someone bought the house though, I had already started school at Steven White Junior High. At first, I kind of liked the idea of moving, but then the cutest boy in the seventh grade started talking to me every day, and I didn’t want to move any more.

  My brother Brian was nine years older than me and had already enrolled in the police academy, so he told Mom and Dad that he was staying behind when we went. That meant that not only was I going to a place where I didn’t know anyone and it rained all the time, I also wouldn’t get to see my brother very often.