Triadic Tales - Fifteen Minutes Before a Roaring Fire - Short Story (Part One)

LOST STARS

Triadic Tales - Fifteen Minutes Before a Roaring Fire - Short Story (Part One) PART TWO
Adam went out to the Vineyard when he needed time to himself. The Broadley family had digs in Menemsha that were for him a sort of second home. 
This visit was for Adam a chance to complete a commission to write a musical narrative for a Bicentennial event. He had completed the lyrics and melodies and shipped them off to someone who could transform his taped effusions into the notation that would enable others to sing what he had written. It remained to get some history done. How did  John Wesley's heart get strangely warmed? How did  "Methodist", the insult, become approbation? 
Adam slept in the front bedroom, not far from the living room and various other rooms adjacent to the large kitchen that was often the scene of informal meals.     On this trip, he woke daily to the sound of argumentation from the master bedroom. The back and forth would make Woody Allen proud. To Adam, the overheard nattering boded the likely dissolution of whatever union there was. 
Adam went way back with the Broadleys and could  remember Morton Broadley's Wife One as if it was yesterday. Wife Two, in the bedroom down the hall, had one of those names you register if you are calling the roll of prominent New England families, with an accent on Newport. Wife Two was now complaining with such energy that Adam could not imagine what sleeping next to her might do, other than cause serious wanderlust. 
It was odd that, when everyone was up, there was no hint of this early morning acrimony. Adam could not figure out what the lack of boudoir inhibition, with him so nearby, signified.  It confused him.
Adam spent the day undisturbed on one of the couches in the sunken living room, determining that Wesley had indeed been moved to universal love at Aldersgate and that Methodists had been tarred with the name Methodist to the point that they took it as a badge of honor. 
Morton came in as the radio played a country song called Too Cold at Home. 
"Good song," Morton said.    It was late afternoon when the intelligence arrived. Wife Two's half-sister was coming to supper with her consort. 
I see no need to go into identities because, at this point, all it would likely create is what Adam's friend Bob out in Vegas said when Adam later mentioned that he had spent fifteen minutes with her. 
"You're lying," he said.
So peremptory and final was Bob's verdict that it convinced Adam that it was dangerous to friendship to appear unbelievable. 
So he kept quiet about his fifteen minutes at Menemsha.
Stephen's Remarkable Kindle Store



Buffer