XVI "Pirate Jokes"
"Hey mister?" A small child was pulling on Roy's pant leg. He and Riza both looked down from their ice cream, and up again looking for a parent.
"Are you lost?" Roy handed his cone off and crouched down. The child couldn't have been more than four or five years old, yet he didn't seem particularly scared.
"Nope. But I wanna ask you something."
"Uh, ok…?"
"Are you a pirate?"
Roy was momentarily stunned. Behind him, Riza started to snicker. The only context they'd ever used that description in was a very private one.
"Kevin, there you are!" A woman carrying several large sacks of shopping negotiated her way forward through the crowd. She gave the kid a light rap on top his skull. "What's gotten into you? I'm sorry to trouble you. He has this fascination with these pirate stories in the news, and I guess he must have followed you—"
After that somber half hour in the graveyard, though, Roy was feeling a bit carefree. Still crouched next to Kevin, he cupped his hands around the boy's ear and whispered.
The innocent round face lit up. "Really?"
"Roy!"
He grinned up at her. "What? Since you were laughing I thought I might at least explain."
"Mom, can girls be pirates too?"
His mother gave Roy a look halfway between amusement and exasperation. "I suppose they can."
"Only when they're kidnapped," Riza said, and dug into Roy's shin with the toe of her shoe. He knew she was blushing.
"Who're you calling a kidnapper?"
"Who're you calling a pirate?"
"And why wouldn't I know who's a pirate and who's not?"
Kevin giggled.
"For one thing it's harder to tell with one eye," Riza said, and looked up to the woman. "We should be apologizing to you. My kidnapper here can also be a bit of a liar sometimes."
They both shared an expression often traded between women everywhere, and Kevin's mother sighed. "Well at least he didn't manage to kidnap this little boy and ship him off to some abandoned island."
"You wouldn't really do that?" Kevin asked.
Roy grinned. "I might. Guess that teaches you not to wander off, huh?"
"Sneaky," Riza complimented him after their encounter had passed, still amused at the little subtexts of the exchange.
He tore his candied cherry off its stem, rolled his eye and didn't reply.