Page 56 of The Unlikely Heir
“God of the sun. Nice.”
Seeing the small upturn of Amara’s lips, Oliver’s voice leaps back into my head.
Just be yourself.
So I force out the voice of BritishPatriot and the others on social media who constantly mock me, and I press on.
“Do you know what the most common game played by Greek gods is?”
She looks at me suspiciously. “What?”
“Hydra and seek.”
Amara gives an agonized groan. I take it as a sign to continue.
“What would Chiron have been called if he’d practiced medicine on the side?”
She puts her hands to her face. “What?”
“The Centaur for Disease Control.”
“Those are the dumbest jokes that have ever been told,” she informs me, but a smile fixes on her face.
“Probably,” I agree. “For some reason, only dumb jokes stick in my mind. All the funny, cool ones slip straight out, and I’m left with the worst puns ever. It’s quite tragic, really.”
Aaanddd…now I’m joking with a cancer-ridden teenager about tragedy. But Amara doesn’t seem to mind.
She’s straightened and is reaching for her phone. “I need to give you some better jokes about Greek gods.”
“That could be your public service for the day,” I agree.
So Amara scrolls through Greek mythology jokes and realizes that good ones are a rare commodity. So she settles on the best of a bad bunch.
“How did the Greeks clean up a battlefield?”
“With Ajax.”
With every bad joke Amara reads out, groaning and rolling her eyes, I feel myself growing lighter inside.
I can do this.
It’s similar to the philosophy I had when I worked in the insurance call center. Leave every person slightly happier than they were at the beginning of the call.
I can apply that same approach to my new job as the Prince of Wales.
Once that concept is straight in my mind, the rest of the visits go smoothly. I can’t do anything to ease people’s pain, but I can try my best to leave them happier than they were before I arrived.
And one of the ways to do that is to make people feel seen and valued. So with every patient, I grasp for something we can talk about. My habit of becoming obsessed with random topics and switching majors so many times in college actually helps because my scope of general knowledge is wide.
But I also realize I don’t have to be an expert on things. It’s about asking people questions and genuinely engaging in the answers.
I’ve always been interested in learning new things, and when Ernest, a guy in his mid-sixties who recently suffered a heart attack, explains the intricacies of betting for Blackjack, I listen closely and ask lots of follow-up questions.
The bonus is if this royalty thing doesn’t work out, I could head to Vegas and try his strategies.
“You’re not what I expected,” Ernest grunts as I stand to leave.
“Is that a good thing or a bad thing?” I ask.
