Page 73 of Truly, Madly Viking

"I'm a Viking."

"I don't believe it!"

It was a Saturday afternoon, two weeks later, when Maggie arrived home from a half-day mental-health conference in Dallas. She'd known that Joe was bored, staying home, with no job. There wasn't a big call for Viking warriors in the work force. But never in a million years had she expected this.

There was a hole in the side of her house. A huge hole. And Joe, dressed in jeans and a sweaty T-shirt, despite the mid-December chill, was wielding the sledgehammer that has caused the damage.

No, that wasn't quite true. Steve was there, too, driving a small backhoe. What was he doing here... out in public? The press had been hounding him for weeks, ever since that reporter had recognized him at the Moving Wall. He'd even moved into the hospital temporarily, to protect his much-wanted privacy.

Maggie glanced around her yard. It wasn't just Steve who was there. There were Suzy and Beth, too, along with several other outpatients from Rainbow, including Natalie, Rosalyn, Harvey, Chuck, and Fred.

They were all helping to remove the debris—debris that was actually the side of her house—and putting it in a Dumpster. A Dumpster? Where did that Dumpster come from?

Fred, dressed as a Village People version of a carpenter, was looking full of himself in a hard hat and tool belt as he followed Joe's orders. Harvey was off to the side counting the number of two-by-fours in one pile and round rocks in another pile, then tabulating his results on an official job-site clipboard.

Chuck was being an elephant today, swinging his loose arms forward like a trunk as he carried large pieces of siding to the Dumpster; Maggie, who still had not diagnosed Chuck's real problem, was not surprised to see the words on the bright young man's shirt: It is as bad as you think, and they are out to get you . Natalie was singing, of course, as she fetched and carried, and Rosalyn looked surprisingly fetching in tight jeans and a T-shirt that proclaimed, Librarians Do It by the Book.

And, oh, good Lord, was that Nurse Hatcher in coveralls and workman's boots, appearing for all the world as if she could take down Maggie's entire house with just a huff and a puff? She was avidly listening to something Fred the Carpenter was telling her. Oh, no! It wasn't possible. Was it? A love connection between Gladys and Fred?

"What do you think you're doing?" Maggie gritted her teeth as she stomped over and confronted Joe.

His head jerked up with surprise. "Mag-he! I thought you weren't going to be home till dinner time.

"My meetings ended early."

"We wanted to surprise you," he complained in a little-boy voice.

She felt like spanking his behind, like a little boy deserved. What did one do to a misbehaving big boy?

Whack him on the butt with a two-by-four? There were plenty of them lying around.

"Surprise!" everyone yelled at once, belatedly. Maggie turned around to see the entire motley crew, including her two grimy daughters, gazing at her expectantly, as if they expected her to congratulate them.

As if! "What is this mess?" she asked, turning back to Joe, who set his sledgehammer aside and was wiping his brow with the back of a forearm. She was trying hard to stifle her fury, for the sake of her daughters, who'd never seen their mother lose her cool. Yet.

"Fireplace," Joe announced. "I'm building your daughters a fireplace."

"Huh?" A fireplace? "What next? Igloos in Florida?"

"Tsk-tsk! Dost think sarcasm is called for, Maghe?"

Maggie gave her daughters her full attention now, and they had the good sense to step back a pace, sensing her disapproval.

"We just mentioned to Joe that we've never had a fireplace," Suzy explained in the whimpery voice that usually meant tears were about to flow.

"And we told him how every Christmas we have to hang our stockings on the living room archway, 'cause we don't have a fireplace," Beth added. Her voice was small and weepy, too.

"Where did you get the money for all this?" she demanded of Joe. There had to be hundreds of dollars'

worth of building materials scattered about her lawn, not to mention the rental of the backhoe. "I sold one of my arm rings to Martie."

She looked at his upper arms. Sure enough, one of the bracelets was gone.

"Martie?"

"Yea. Martie Wilson. Remember, you told me one day that Dock-whore Seabold's lover—"

She inhaled sharply with distress. "I never told you they were lovers."