Like a mommy and daddy on a TV show.”
I smiled, but my throat was suddenly dry. I now understood why they’d shown married couples sleeping in separate beds on sitcoms in the 50s. To avoid conversations like this.
To be honest, I was fine to talk honestly with a kid about things like this, but this wasn’t my kid. This was Noah’s kid, and he was fiercely protective of her. I felt like I needed to tread lightly here.
“Should I still call you Miss Lacey Larsen?” she asked.
“Of course—well, I mean, I told you from the beginning you can just call me Lacey.”
She sipped at her milk and furrowed her brows at me. “Okay. I’ll call you Lacey. Does fiancée mean you’re going to get married?”
I nearly spit out my coffee. Why did she save the full interrogation for right after Noah left? Couldn’t she have asked Noah this? Could I just tell her to put this all on pause until Noah came back down? I didn’t want to get him angry at me for answering these questions wrong, but then again, he’d kind of put me into this spot, so he couldn’t get too mad with me. Could he?
“Um,” I said, “that was a tiny little story we had to make up for your daddy’s work. We’re not really getting married.”
Naomi looked down into her cup and stuck out her bottom lip. She crossed her arms and walked away. She took her stuffed panda and her stuffed cat and had them start playing together.
I felt bad because I could tell she was upset, but I didn’t want to press the issue and get deeper into this conversation without Noah around.
Thankfully men shower and get ready fast, and I knew I wouldn’t have to wait too long.
Just as I heard the water shut off though, Naomi came up to me and put her stuffed animals on the table. She made the panda walk up to me, and she bobbed its head up and down to mimic it speaking. She made the panda speak in a high-pitched, scratchy voice.
“Miss Lacey Larsen,” the panda said, “Naomi wants you to be her mommy. Maybe you should fiancée her Daddy?”
I heard Noah’s footsteps now. “Um, Mr. Panda, why don’t you talk to Naomi’s daddy about this?”
Noah came into the kitchen. He was wearing white board shorts that showed off a hint of his muscular thighs, and a light-blue button-up shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and the first few buttons undone to show off a hint of his chest hair. It was one of the more casual outfits I’d seen him wear, but it fit for the cruise ship.
“What’s up?” he asked.
The panda walked—well, it actually flew magically through the air up to Noah—and then it said in the same voice. “Naomi wants you to marry Miss Lacey Larsen so she can have a mommy!”
Noah’s face drained of color, and he looked up at me, and then at Naomi.
“Naomi,” he said, “This is...it’s still early.”
“Maybe after breakfast then!” the panda said.
“I mean it’s early with Lacey and me.”
Naomi held the panda against her chest and squeezed. She asked in her own voice, though it was low and embarrassed. “Then why did Silas say you’re gonna fiancée?”
He sighed. “We lied about that. We didn’t want to lie to you about that, but to the other grownups. It’s bad to lie, and we shouldn’t have done it.”
“So you’re not ever gonna get married?” Naomi asked.
Noah took the panda and held it up. “I’m going to whisper a secret about that to Mr. Panda. You can ask him what I said.”
He held the panda’s ear to his mouth and whispered something, but I couldn’t hear it.
He handed the panda back to Naomi. “See if he’ll tell you.”
“Mr. Panda is very good at keeping secrets,” Naomi said.
It somehow defused the situation. Lacey let it rest.
Later, when Noah was helping get Naomi ready, I picked Mr. Panda up. He was worn down in the way a very loved stuffed animal always was. His stuffing was completely uneven so that his head was nearly completely deflated. He had a permanent smug little grin on his face, which now made me think he was grinning like that because he was keeping a secret. I held his head up to my ear. “Spill the beans, Mr. Panda.”
I looked at him again, and the black little beads of his eyes just shone my own annoyed reflection back at me.
The next few days were good.