The Overlook
by Morgan Harlow
[ fiction - february 09 ]
"You'd better be careful what you say, we only know he's a Party A supporter because his wife told me he was. There's no indication of it otherwise." My voice trailed off as we both watched Will emerge from the cab of the steel gray Hummer - the two boys, our son and his, running ahead to the door of his ex-wife's apartment to retrieve a few games.
"As a matter of fact," I joked, "he's probably listening to us right now, all it takes is a light touch on the back like the one he gave you when we met at the school parking lot and the listening device is planted and ready."
I pulled our car sharply to the left to a row of parking spots overlooking the highway, then thought better of it and maneuvered the car so we were facing the direction we had come. Jim gave a bemused grunt as I repositioned the car, backing up, moving forward, one too many turns of the wheel perhaps, but well worth it, I thought.
"C'mon, Kate," he laughed. "Isn't that going too far?"
"What?" I answered. "Look at that steep drop, I'm not going to park there. It's the kind of place you hear about people driving off of, forgetting to put their car into reverse; going off in the fog or not being able to see at night."
I cut the motor. "So you really said that to him about our Party B sign? Hope you can overlook it? We don't have to apologize, just because he's an A supporter. He can like it or not, it is what it is."
"You're right," Jim said. "It all seems pretty strange, doesn't it, the way he's following us to our house instead of letting us drive the kids to our house after school."
"Do you think we should invite him in? His wife said he'd sit and wait in the car."
I had met S-- that morning, when, according to a plan we had worked out by phone the night before, she followed me to our house after we had each dropped our child at school. Danny had been wanting to invite his new friend, Chase, over, but we didn't know his last name and so were unable to look up their phone number. Then Chase and his father, Will, had telephoned to ask if Chase and Danny could get together. It was arranged that his mother would call so we could work out the details. When S-- called an hour or so later she explained that they were super protective parents and wanted to meet us and see our house before Chase came over. Jim and I consider ourselves to be protective as well, so I understood where she was coming from, especially seeing as how they were new to the area.
Once we were at the kitchen table talking, S-- told me she knew we were okay when she saw the six-foot-high B Party yard sign at the end of our driveway. She told me her ex-husband would not like it, but that he wouldn't say anything. We laughed about this, and when she left I felt I had made a new friend.
Now I turned to Jim. "We should invite him in for cake. It seems like the right thing to do, and, who knows, he just might be nice." After he had followed us home and we were seated around the kitchen table, we discovered that Will had story after amazing story to tell. The one that really caught our attention involved a car parked at the side of a cliff, a failed emergency brake, and a river below, all told in clipped Party A-speak that made Jim look at me sideways. By then we both knew Will knew that we knew he had overheard what we'd been saying in the car back at the apartment parking lot, and this was his way of letting us know he was keeping an eye on us. The B Party was leading and I had an uncomfortable feeling that Will and others like him across the country were on a mission to try to change that, one or two voters at a time.
