Papa. Lucky would never tire of hearing that.
“I’ve been thinking. How about Luna for a girl?” Bo opened a browser and entered the name. The guy put a lot of research into this list. Hell, he put a lot of research into everything.
“Ain’t that a kind of moth?” They were so not naming their kid after an insect.
“Okay, scratch Luna. What you got?”
Lucky pulled a name out of thin air. “Angelique?”
“Angelique Schollenberger. Do you have any idea how old she’ll be before she can spell her name? Especially if we give her a middle name with more than one syllable.” Good point. Andro might one day give them grief about his mouthful of a name. Plenty of names meant plenty of nickname opportunities should the kid feel the need for a change.
Middle name. They had to come up with more than one? Walter’s wife didn’t have a middle name, and she’d gotten along fine in life. “Ann? Jan? Sue?”
Bo rolled his eyes Heavenward, “We need to put a lot of thought into this. That name goes with them their whole lives. We need something tasteful, yet unique enough that if a teacher calls their first name, fifteen kids in their class don’t answer.” He paused to nuzzle the baby’s nose, then Lucky’s. “If we don’t do this right, the kid might hate us. I know I hate the name my parents gave me.” Nothing wrong with William Patrick Schollenberger, III, except for William Patrick Schollenberger, II dragging the name through the mud and giving Bo reasons to want to forget any connection.
“Yeah. Try being named after a NASCAR track.” Richmond, Charlotte, Dallas, Daytona, and Bristol. Only, Lucky liked to tease Dallas by calling him Dover, and he’d picked on Charlotte mercilessly as kids with the nickname Talladega. Oh, who was he fooling? He still called her that when he wanted to work her nerves.
Which he definitely didn’t want to do these days. Pregnancy hormonesandthe fiery hot Lucklighter temper? No thank you.
Bo flipped a tab on his spreadsheet. “Okay. We can leave off girl’s names for now. How about boys?” He’d labeled a third tab,“Names that can be used for either.”
Lucky ticked off points on his fingers. “We can’t name him after my dad, my grandfather, who still doesn’t talk to me, none of my uncles, and sure as hell none of my brothers. Alejandro got Walter’s name.” Oh, wow! Inspiration. “How about Alexander?”
Bo shook his head. Andro giggled and grabbed his hair. Bo shook his head again to ease the death grip before he went bald. “We can’t name both our sons the same name. That’s what Alejandro means in Spanish.”
Oh, right. Lucky knew that. “What you got?”
“Charles, Taylor, Kyle, James.”
“Nope, not James. Uncle on my mother’s side. And James’ll get turned into Jimmy and fall into the whole fifteen-kids-in-class-with-the-same-name thingy.” Not to mention the pain in Lucky’s ass from work called Jimmy. “What kind of family names you got, besides William and Patrick?”
“Grover, Winston, Eugene—”
Lucky shuddered. “Not Eugene.”
“Oh, right. That was your middle name.”
Lucky might go by Simon Harrison now, but he’d come into the world as Richmond Eugene Lucklighter.
“There’s Great-Uncle Grover, and my great-grandfather on my mother’s side was Winston.”
The kid was half Lucklighter. If he was small, a name like Grover might toughen him up just to keep from getting beaten up in grade school. “Imagine our son, the names Grover or Winston, and a bunch of judgmental eight-year-olds.”
“Okay. Strike those.” Bo rested against the back of the couch, rolling his head to stare at Lucky. “The kid has to have a name. The more I research, the more I realize I don’t have a clue.”
“He or she isn’t here yet. You know, it would be easier to pick a name if we knew whether we were having a boy or girl.” Lucky patted Bo’s knee and batted his eyes.
Bo scowled. “Now, Lucky, we agreed.”
Funny. Whenever Charlotte and Bo brought up the agreement to wait till the child’s arrival to find out if it was a boy or girl, Lucky couldn’t quite recall nodding and saying,“Yeah, I’m down with that.”Didn’t mean it hadn’t happened, but…“What if we choose a name, meet the kid, and the name doesn’t fit?”
“That’s why we keep a list, so we’ll have plenty of options. We’ll weed out the ones we don’t like, and go into the hospital with maybe five for a boy and five for a girl. That way we have plenty to choose from.”
Plenty didn’t help if none seemed right. Dear God, let Victor and Nestor not chime in with their opinions. That’d be so like them. Buying furniture didnotgive them naming rights.
Charlotte stepped from the kitchen, sipping a cup of something that might be herbal tea, since she’d given up coffee for the pregnancy.
“What do you think of Eva, Charlotte?” Bo asked.
