(insert sinister laugh and crazed look in my eyes)
I keep driving. I reach another stop sign. She’s still there. I drive past the grocery store. She follows. Another stop sign, a right turn, past the bank. She’s still on me, a maniac on four wheels disguised in the all too common and safe cover of the Toyota Camry.
Snaking through the parking lots, I try to drop her but she’s right there. Relentless. Not giving this one up easily. And then I start to wonder – who follows someone through a parking lot? And on top of that, what kind if woman follows another woman? Really – what was she going to do? Stop when I stopped, get out of her car and what? Yell at me? Throw her purse at me? Feeling pretty pumped up from lifting weights after the pool, I was ready to go. I’d take her on. I may be elf-like and tiny, but like the blog says I can pack a big punch. Need I show her?
That was it. If she would follow, I would bring it there. Oh you want more, I think to myself? You really want to tangle with me? Time to take this on to the real road, I thought. She chose the wrong person to follow, the person with the entire day off with plenty of time for an all day joy ride towards western Illinois.
I take a left onto a major road, throwing the bait, wondering if she’ll bite. She follows.
A bit of traffic ties me up waiting to turn right on a state route and she catches up, waiting with me. My eyes narrow. I watch her in the mirror.
The light turns green. I turn right. I bolt, accelerating to the permissible 50 mph until the lane narrows and I own the now single lane. I’ve dropped her completely leaving a trail of 3 – 4 cars in front of her and in my wake. I’m putting time between myself and the pack behind me so I decide to take a risk. To take the time to slow down and take a right turn into a subdivision. If she somehow sees me, and still chooses to follow then I decide I will stop the car and see what crazy looks like face to face.
I make the turn. Watching in my mirror I wait until the white car goes by, still heading west on Route 56. For all I know, she could still be chasing the phantom from the Panera parking lot, heading west on the state route until it meets the interstate and disappears into Iowa. Hope she likes corn.
I turn the car around, and make my way back towards Panera parking myself there for the rest of the afternoon. And from the table with my coffee and WiFi, I kept a careful, close eye on my car and waited for a white Camry to roll by.
It never happened and I’m glad about that. After all, this was my day off and nowhere on my list of things to do today, between coffee and the pool, was there an open time slot for getting into a cat fight with a woman driving a white Camry.
But just for the record, if there was, I totally would have taken her on and shown her what this clown car was all about.
