Page 87 of Truly, Madly Viking

Where had this playfulness and sense of humor come from? Joe had been such a grim fellow when she'd first met him. Hmmm. Maybe she was a good influence on him. But she couldn't let his outlandish statement stand. "Perfection, huh? A little full of yourself today, aren't you?"

"With good cause, m'lady," he bragged, pointing out, "You would know that best of all."

Maggie couldn't stop her face from heating with embarrassment.

"Mayhap I should get a tattoo, then," Joe offered, stopping in his tracks and resisting her efforts to move him along the sidewalk.

"No!"

"I could purchase a tattoo of a killer whale," he suggested. "Mayhap that would be a good thing to do, Mag-he, like an offering to the gods to appease their wrath."

"The gods of orcas?" she inquired with raised eyebrows.

He shrugged. " 'Twould appear anything is possible."

His forehead creased with thought. "Yea, I could put a drawing of a whale on my arse. Thora has a fondness for my arse, you know."

"You are impossible," she said with a laugh, shoving him into the Old Strand Emporium, where they soon ordered deli sandwiches and mugs of draft beer. From the back could be heard a cacophony of musical sounds coming from the Wurlitzer Band Organ, player pianos, and oldtime banjo-player jukeboxes.

"Mayhap I will buy one of those music machines for Sue-zee for Christmas," Joe suggested as he took a long swallow of beer.

"Are you crazy?" she asked, then immediately ducked her head with shame. What a question for a psychologist to be asking... especially of a former patient. "I mean... do you know how much those jukeboxes cost? At least five thousand dollars."

He pulled out a wad of bills from his back pocket and laid them out on the table. "Don't I have five thousand dollars?" Joe hadn't yet mastered the currency system.

She motioned for him to put the money away before the bug-eyed diners at the other tables decided to help themselves. "Joe, you have sixty thousand dollars left. That's not the issue. You can't be buying such expensive gifts for people."

"Why not?"

"Because you already bought a laptop computer for Beth and a pricey video-game system with a dozen cartridges for Suzy, both against my protests."

"You wouldn't let me buy that word-shert that proclaimed, I Love Cats. They Taste Just Like Chicken."

"Get real," she commented. "Rita would never forgive me."

He raised his chin stubbornly. "Viking people love to give gifts, and to receive them, too." He was back to the subject of expensive gifts. "Why is it wrong to purchase items that might please someone?"

"Because sometimes your generosity goes too far."

"Mag-he," he said with a long sigh, "generosity is when a person gives something till it hurts. Spending a few thousand dollars on people I care about is not going to affect me at all. Further more—I do not care how much you resist—I intend to buy gifts for Steve, Hair-vee, Chuck, Fur-red, Rosalyn, Not-a-lie, and Norse Hatch-her, as well."

Maggie put her face in her hands. The man just would not listen to her. The hospital gave Christmas gifts—small items, to be sure—to all its patients. It wasn't a good idea to get too personal with the patients.

Or was it?

Maggie had seen on more than one occasion how Joe's relationship with the therapy group, even though he was no longer a patient, had helped everyone.

Treating them as friends, rather than sick people, had raised their self-esteem, and jump-started some real mental-health progress.

"Okay," she agreed, "but we have to work together on this. You're not going to go off the deep end buying extravagant presents."

"Who? Me?" he asked. Then, out of the clear blue sky, he commented, "I am picturing you naked right now. Do you like that?"

The man had a one-track mind. And frankly, she did like it. A lot. But she couldn't tell him that.

He winked at her. Oh, my. Could he read her mind now? Then he stretched his long legs out, crossing them at the ankles. The whole time he sipped at his beer, which he continued to refer to as mead.

A lot of men and women in the restaurant took note of Joe with surreptitious glances his way, even a gray-haired lady with a sweatshirt saying, Forget Youth.