Walt was reading the mail as he walked into the house. One was a dinner invitation from Frankie’s Steak House. Frankie’s was a very popular place. The invitation said Walt and a guest were invited to a free dinner. It didn’t actually say Walt, it said current resident. That was Walt. The word free always got to Walt.

“Nancy! We’ve been invited to a dinner”.

“By who?”, she asked.

“Frankie’s Steak House”, Walt told her.

That got Nancy’s skepticism going. She took the invitation and read it.

“Walt, it’s a chicken dinner. You aren’t getting a free steak out of this. You’re getting some cheapie chicken thing. It’s says a speaker will be talking about joint pains, headaches, arthritis, lower back pain, upper back pain, and a lot more. It also says something about negative magnetic force fields. What’s that got to do with pain?”

“We have all those things! This is for us! Magnets are cheap. We have them all over the fridge”.

“What are they trying to sell us?”, she asked.

“Doesn’t say they’re trying- oh, yea. Guess they wouldn’t just be giving a free dinner and a talk on this. Still, we don’t have to buy anything. It’s a free dinner”

“Like the free Afghan?”, Nancy said.

“That was your notion, not mine. We didn’t buy the condo, did we?”, Walt said defensively.

“No, we didn’t. The 45 minute tour turned into 2 hours. The “no pressure” turned into enough pressure to turn coal into a diamond. Took us 4 hours of nerve-racking time to get that Afghan. By that time, I only wanted to get out of there. They could keep the Afghan”, Nancy reminded Walt.

“Yea, I was ready to make a run for it myself. Jeez, we couldn’t have bought that condo with a thousand year mortgage. No bank would have loaned us that much money. Still-”, Walt remembered.

“Still what?”, Nancy asked.

“Still, we got the Afghan”.

“It came apart in a week”, Nancy remembered.