Page 43 of The Last Viking

Meredith glanced toward the kitchen where Thea was twittering gaily with Mike and Rolf as they stacked the dishes in the dishwasher and cleaned off the table. Thea’s mother hadn’t even asked to speak to her, or asked about her well-being.

She was blinking rapidly to prevent tears from brimming over in her eyes when Rolf walked toward her. Waving the two videotapes in her face, he said, “Stop looking so weepish, sweetling. We are going to learn all about power tools.” Meredith put her face in her hands, but not before Rolf added, “And I’ve got dessert.” Somewhere he’d found another bag of Oreos. Maybe they sold them in the hardware store. Thea and Mike followed with four glasses of milk.

Jeffrey would have a heart attack if he could see her eating junk food. He was a devout advocate of the “good nutrition feeds the brain” mantra. And junk TV was an even worse no-no. Unlike her parents, she and Jeffrey had had a television in their home, but he would have put a block on any channel showing anything as lowbrow as Tim Allen.

Meredith cringed at that sudden, unwelcome memory, and then straightened with resolution. Starting right now, she was going to stop that creep Jeffrey from ruling her life. “Great!” she said, plopping down to the couch. “I can’t wait.” And she really meant it, too.

An hour later, though, Meredith’s stomach churned. And it wasn’t just the Oreos and milk on top of chili and sourdough biscuits. It was Rolf and the effect TV had on him. The Viking stared, transfixed, at the TV screen, howling with delight, along with Thea and Mike. Oh, Bob Vila had held his attention, but the Home Improvement klutz was the true hit.

“Look at this, Merry-Death. Tim is building a man’s toilet. It has a reclining La-Z-Boy seat and a footstool and a built-in stand for his mead and cigar. Is that not hilarious?”

Yeah, hilarious.

“What’s a cigar? Can we buy some cigars tomorrow, Mike?”

“Sure,” Mike said.

“Yech,” Thea said.

“Absolutely not,” Meredith said.

On and on, the episodes went. And Meredith realized that she’d created a monster—a Viking whose hero was Tim Allen of Home Improvement.

Rolf turned to her and sighed, “I think Tim must be one of your modern gods. Even his companion, Al…he is surely one of the lesser gods.”

“Hardly.”

Rolf finally clicked off the switch on the remote and looked directly at Meredith. “I have a wonderful idea.”

Meredith’s queasy stomach roiled in foreboding. Mike and Thea waited expectantly; they treated Rolf as if he was a god himself and the words he spoke were golden pebbles of wisdom.

“Let us invite Tim Allen to come here and help us build our longship.”

Chapter Eight

It was ten o’clock, and Meredith was still on the telephone—this time with her mother and father.

Seated at separate desks in the office they’d fashioned for themselves years ago in the walnut-paneled library of their Princeton home, her parents managed to harangue her with a three-way phone conversation.

How many times over how many years had Meredith been called into that inner sanctum to account for her frivolous ways? As if she’d known how to be frivolous! Had she ever really lived up to their high standards of personal and academic excellence? No matter how hard she tried to please them, she was as much a failure in their eyes as Jillie, who didn’t try at all.

Meredith’s queasy stomach roiled, probably portending an ulcer. Coward that she was, instead of fighting back, she took refuge in calling up the invisible wall that screened out their condemnations. If she refused to listen, they couldn’t hurt her.

Meredith instead concentrated on the sounds of Thea moving around upstairs, preparing for bed. Outside, the rhythmic rasp of sandpaper against wood reflected Rolf’s obsession to work till he dropped so that he could hasten his trip home. When Meredith considered his inevitable departure, a dullness of spirit weighed her down. Why, she couldn’t imagine. Rolf had been in her life only two days, and yet he filled such a need in her…one she still didn’t understand and certainly never realized was there.

Who was he? And why had he come into her world? There had to be a reason.

“Do you hear me, Meredith Ann?” her mother chided. “You were a daydreamer as a child. Apparently you haven’t lost the nasty habit. Pay attention, dear. This is important.”

“Now, Lillian, don’t upset the girl,” her father interrupted. Her father always referred to her as “the girl.” She wondered if he knew how offensive that sounded. Probably not. “The girl doesn’t understand the importance of the information she transmitted to us this afternoon. She never did take her work seriously enough.”

“She’s probably still fixated on that worthless ex-husband of hers. I told you from the beginning, Herbert, that their marriage would never work. Didn’t I?”

“Yes, Lillian, you did.”

“I was never impressed with Jeffrey’s Mensa I.Q. After all, he was only a graduate of a state university. And vain…my goodness, that mustache of his was a clear giveaway.”

“Well, now, Einstein had a mustache, Lillian. We must be tolerant.”