I couldn’t stand to be in the same place as him. I don’t think he could stand to be in the same place as me either.
When we got home, he stormed upstairs to his office without another word. I dropped my decommissioned backpack on the kitchen table and filled the kettle from the pitcher of filtered water I kept on the counter. I always used filtered water—it tasted way better than tap water—though Stephen Kellner liked to complain about the redundancy of keeping a pitcher of filtered water when the refrigerator already had a water filter built in.
Stephen Kellner complained about everything I liked.
In Russia, people use a samovar—a smaller version of Smaug the Voluminous—to heat a bunch of water, and then mix it with über-strong tea from a smaller pot. Persians have adopted that method too, except most Persians use a large kettle and a smaller pot you can stack on top, like a double boiler.
So, when the water boiled, I filled our teapot—a stainless steel one that came in a gift set with the kettle—with three scoops of our Persian tea blend and one sachet of Rose City Earl Grey tea. Mom called it her secret ingredient: It had enough bergamot in it to scent a teapot twice as large as ours, so whenever she had Persian guests they always complimented her on how fragrant her tea was.
I pulled down the cardamom jar, pulled out five pods, and stuck them beneath the jar.
Whack, whack, whack!
Maybe I was a little more enthusiastic about smashing hel than usual, after my fight with Dad.
Maybe I was.
I dropped the crushed pods into the pot, filled it with water, and waited for it to finish damming.
Mom picked up Laleh on her way home from work. She went upstairs to pack, while I had tea with Laleh, which was our tradition when I didn’t have to work after school.
Laleh always took her tea with three cubes of sugar and one cube of ice, and she always clanged the teaspoon against the sides of her glass teacup as she stirred. Somehow, no matter how hard or how vigorously Laleh stirred, she never slopped tea over the sides of her glass or spilled on herself. I didn’t know how she did it.
I still spilled tea on myself at least once a week.
Laleh took a tentative sip, holding her tea with both hands.
“Too hot?”
She smacked her lips. “Nope.”
I didn’t understand how Laleh could drink lukewarm tea.
“Taste good?”
“Yeah.” She took another slurp.
It was nice, sharing tea with Laleh. I didn’t get to see her that much on work nights, but like I said, Mr. Apatan had given me the week off. Despite his frustrating literal-mindedness, Mr. Apatan was a pretty cool boss.
“It’s your first time going home?” he had asked.
“Uh.” I thought it was interesting, how he had called ithome.
I wondered why he called it that. What made him call Iran home, when he knew I was born and raised in Portland.
“It’s my first time to Iran.”
“It’s so important, you know? To see where you came from.” Mr. Apatan was born in Manila, and he still went to visit once a year. “You have a lot of family there?”
“Yeah. My mom has two brothers. And her parents.”
“Good.” Mr. Apatan had peered at me over the top of his glasses. “Have a good trip, Darius.”
“Thanks.”
Mom ordered pizza for dinner, to avoid having a big mess to clean up before we left. It was a thin crust, half pepperoni, half pineapple.
Laleh loved pineapple on her pizza.
