Ready

His left hand steadying the steering wheel, Jon reaches with his right to eject, flip, then re-insert the mix-tape he’s made for me. In the seconds before the music begins, I consult the cassette case to see what’s next: a song by Muddy Waters.

Piano is quickly joined by drums, then bass, then harmonica, then Jon, who turns to me, smiling, as he sings along to “I’m Ready.”

I smile back, then we both look ahead into the remarkably uncongested lane before us on the main expressway out of the city. It is just shy of 8:00 a.m. on a Sunday. On a holiday.

It’s funny, I think. Last year—and the year before and the year before that one—I would have been heading home at this time, too, but from the Easter Sunrise Service at our church, not from the Maxwell Street Market. Neither my mom nor my siblings wanted to get up for the 5:00 a.m. service this year, and my dad’s not around to make us, but I still haven’t digested the fact that my mom let me leave the house on a holiday, let alone with a boy two years older than me, even if it is a pre-breakfast outing to browse the stalls at a street market.

Breakfast. That is one reason I’m sorry to miss the Sunrise Service. After the mass, an older parishioner, George, always puts on the greatest breakfast. Mounds of fresh fruit ringed with palm fronds, island volcanos erupting pineapple, melons, strawberries. What always gets me is the coconut. Not the shredded kind for baking (the kind I steal by the handful when there are no other sweets in the house). Chunks of real coconut, some still in their hairy brown husks. My stomach longs for them—for anything, really. I should have said yes when Jon offered to buy tamales at the market, but I hate for a boy to watch me eat.

I wonder what we’ll have for breakfast at home this morning. I wonder, too, if the morning will have gotten started without me, then remember that my siblings are on college time, so there’s no way. Also, I remember that nothing gets started before the Easter basket hunt, and I know they won’t start that without me. I’m fourteen and out with a boy, but I’m still the baby, and I have no doubt the basket hunt this year is largely for my sake; otherwise, my sister Monica wouldn’t have snuck away to fill the baskets out of my sight last night, and my mom wouldn’t have whispered over the phone last week, “I’ll buy the candy, but I’m not filling the baskets; I always hated that.” Past tense. Something is over.

Jon again takes his right hand from the steering wheel, this time to take one of my hair’s waves into it and sing with Muddy Waters about good-looking girls with hair like mine. Then he returns his hand to the wheel and starts explaining that a lot of people think this is a Buddy Guy song, don’t realize that his is a cover. I nod, as I have done frequently this morning. This tape, this outing, is clearly meant to be an education. Jon couldn’t believe I’d never been to Maxwell Street, instructed me that early morning is the best time to go so vendors don’t think you’re just another Blues Brothers tourist. So much for me to learn.

And yet he’d gone on about how he likes me because I’m so well-read and know so much about art and music (if not the blues). That’s why, he had told me as we surveyed the incense burners at one of the market stalls, he so wishes he wasn’t fresh out of a long-term relationship. If he were ready for a relationship, I’d be just what he wanted. Yes, this morning has been an education.

Jon turns up the volume and growl-sings with Muddy Waters about how ready he is. I look to my lap where I’ve cradled the incense burner I’d finally chosen: a black painted skull with a hole in the top of its head for the wooden bottom of an incense stick. I lift it, surprised again by its heft, consolation in the face of what seems, upon closer inspection, to be a bad paint job.

Jon stops singing to ask, “What are you going to name him?” Reading my confusion, he looks to the incense holder in my hands. “You’ve got to give him a name.”

Like so many things Jon has said today, this suggestion is somehow charming. And like always, I want what I say to impress, to set me apart from the likes of ex-girlfriends one isn’t quite over. Jon’s already decided the black skull is a boy’s and so I scan the boys’ names in my mind, trying to push past the names of cousins and classmates, all too conventional. I browse book characters for novel names. And then it just comes to me.

“Atticus,” I say.

“Perfect.” Jon signals to exit the expressway, nodding in approval.

I don’t admit I haven’t read To Kill a Mockingbird or even seen the movie, nor that I know nothing about Atticus except that he is the admired dad in the story. Mostly, I’ve just heard the name and thought it sufficiently unique to impress Jon, which it has. And I like the sound of it. Atticus, I say in my head, looking at the imperfectly painted black skull in my hand. Having named him, I feel protective of him, hold him a little more gently, draw my thumb softly across his plaster forehead as if to wipe clean his memory of a life before me.

Kate Sjostrom is a writer and writing teacher educator based in Oak Park, IL. Her work has been published in Rhyme & Rhythm: Poems for Student Athletes, RHINO, English Journal, and elsewhere.