Where Three Roads Meet

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If and when he ever gets his narrative shit together, Will Chase might tell the Story of the Three Freds more or less like this — freely changing names, roles, settings, and any other elements large or small as his by-then-more-seasoned muse sees fit, neither to protect the innocent nor to shield the blamable, but simply to make the tale more tellworthy:

Mid-spring mid-morning in mid-twentieth-century USA — in the mid-Atlantic-coast state of Maryland, to be exact, and even in mid-sentence, as our then young and recently interrupted narrator made to resume his anecdote-in-progress by saying to his apartment-mates, "As I was saying, guys" — their telephone rang again.

"Your turn," his friend Al said to their friend Winnie: a standing joke between that latter pair (although both were in fact seated, on their hand-me-down couch in their gradstudent apartment in the university's high-rise Briarwood Residences, just off campus), inasmuch as in those days before phone-answering machines, Winnie, Al's girlfriend, took all their calls, for reasons presently to be explained, and thus had taken the previously interruptive one (wrong number) a few minutes before. With a roll of her eyes she reached again for the phone — one of those black rotary-dial jobs, standard issue back then — on the hand-me-down end table next to which she customarily sat, when reading or chatting, for just that purpose.

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