Atticus

When I first met him, he was on to his pot smoking and Wild Turkey drinking phase and through with his newspaper owning phase. He was all of 29 at that point. He owned the table and was writing a novel, “Eternal Summer” or something like that. I tried not to pass judgement. I was the Carraway to his Gatsby. We went to the house at the beach in July, two years, that I liked to say belonged to his family, on the beach just down from the architect’s place. I don’t know. I drove the convertible back to college town that week. His sister brought him back later. There was a kiss. Me and her. 25 and 18 (or 17, shhh).
Atticus me Laurie at a coffee shop by accident. That’s the most I remember of the details. It must’ve been summer. Blonde and sleek, red and freckled and pasty. Once he figured that it wasn’t going to work – a few years before he met Jehovah – he would buy the table where they sat when the kids in town turned from caffeine and coffee to whiskey and revolution. He would buy the table where we played cards and drank the kids’ whiskey, and we likely got high, and we stared out over the small city, through the arched windows, onto the streets where she once walked. He would talk of her in that way that we remember the actress (mind you, not the character) where you learned things about women right at that cusp of puberty. But that was before the war. That was before she died.