Fourth Comings_ A Jessica Darling Novel - Megan McCafferty [25]
“Ow!” She winced, groaned, then admonished her stomach: “Destiny, settle down in there!”
Destiny?
“Omigod! We’re naming the baby Destiny Estrella. Did we tell you that?”
No, she had not.
“It’s because Scotty and I totally think it was quote destiny unquote that brought us together.”
Really? It wasn’t the Natty Lite?
(If the Dalai Lama were there, he would’ve made the same joke. But being His Holiness and all, he probably could have gotten away with saying it to her face.)
“And Estrella means quote star unquote in Spanish….”
“Uh,” I said, this time out loud. “Didn’t you take Spanish for four years?”
“Yeah, so?” she huffed.
“So you should know that the Spanish l isn’t pronounced.”
“What do you mean it isn’t pronounced?” Sara sniffed.
“The l in Spanish doesn’t sound like l, it sounds like y,” I explained. “So it’s Es-STRAY-ya. Not Es-STRELL-A.”
I was trying to spare Sara the embarrassment of mispronouncing her daughter’s middle name for the rest of her life. And you know what I was thinking about when I did this? What you told me about the Four Abodes of Buddhism: kindness, compassion, joy in others’ joy, and level-headedness. The Four Abodes are just great, Marcus. Really. They make sense to me. They kick the Ten Commandments’ ass. I mean, you’d have to be a total dick not to be down with the Four Abodes. And yet whenever I speak with the Four Abodes in mind, I still sound like a bitch.
“Whatev,” Sara said. “I like it my way.”
“It’s a great name,” Bethany said, snapping my bra strap in admonishment.
“Omigod! I know! It was gonna be quote star unquote in Italian, you know, because of my heritage and all, but star in Italian is quote SteLLa unquote,” Sara said, going out of her way to overpronounce the l’s. “And Stella is, like, an old lady’s name. Like someone with drooping boobs who pushes a mop for a living.”
I followed my sister’s cue and nodded vigorously.
Sara covered her mouth, then burped into her hand. “And star has a deep significance for us as a couple because there were all these stars out the night that we, you know, quote conceived unquote. But Destiny Star is, like, a porn name. Destiny EstreLLa is, you know, quote classy unquote.”
Oh, yes. The mangling of foreign words is always considered the epitome of genteel refinement. As is referring to oneself as “classy.”
Sara burped again, only this time she didn’t bother covering her mouth. “Scotty and I have known each other since kindergarten, you know, but we never even thought to hook up with each other until we started meeting up at the Bamboo Bar on breaks and we realized that we had so much in common, like the same core values. It was destiny. Destiny…”
So it was destiny that got Sara knocked up. Not the drunken, unprotected sex under the stars in the Bamboo Bar parking lot. Got it.
(I’m sorry, Marcus. This is how I really think, despite my failed efforts to think otherwise. Isn’t it better you know the truth than live with the illusion that I am a kinder, more evolved person than I really am?)
And just when I thought we had finally exhausted the subject of baby names, Sara told a long and gassy story about how she would have named a boy baby Alessandro Destino after her father, whom everyone calls Wally, and how that’s just a childhood nickname stemming from his siblings’ taunts about his being “wall-eyed,” and how the reclamation of that insult was proof of his resilience, and how she hopes Destiny Estrella inherits her grandfather’s strong character and savvy business sense but not his crossed eyes and—
Sara abruptly clutched her gut. “Omigod! Why am I even telling you this?”
I was wondering the exact same thing.
“I should be telling you about my Vera Wang. I ordered a size two!”
I was speechless.
“That’s, uh…” I turned to my sister for help. “Uh…”
“Ambitious,” Bethany finished. “It’s a lot of work taking care of a newborn, and planning a wedding….