“The day I turn down coffee is the day I die,” Lee’s father said with a smile. He walked around the counter and pulled out a drawer, then handed Lee a tablespoon and patted him too hard on the shoulder before going back to the couch.
When his father turned his back, Lee pulled out a bag of decaf from the cabinet. It was supposed to be for Hina—his dad’s girlfriend—but his father wouldn’t know the difference. Lee opened the bag of coffee beans and scooped out a spoonful, but his hand stilled before he could dump it into the grinder.
The coffee had no smell.
He shook the beans around and breathed deeper, just to be sure, but could smell nothing at all.
“It’s a Japanese brand,” his dad called from across the room, misunderstanding why Lee had frozen with his nose in the coffee bag. “It might smell different. I’m still figuring out the best one.”
“Yeah, it smells different,” Lee said quickly.
His arms worked on autopilot to scoop out the coffee beans, then he sealed the bag and stuffed it into the depths of a cabinet. And here was another anomaly—the bag was already open, soHina had already made coffee, and if she’d thought something was wrong with it, she would have thrown it away. Lee was the only one who couldn’t smell.
Lee Turner did not have allergies, or a cold, or a deviated septum. He knew that loss of smell either meant there was something wrong with your nose, or your brain.
He ground the beans, then filled the French press with exquisite carefulness, worried his shaking hands would spill the coffee or knock the whole thing over. He flipped the hourglass timer, mumbled something about the bathroom, and slipped into the hallway, where he took another Benadryl even though it would probably put him to sleep. It was too much, too soon, but he had to drink coffee with his father, who would notice if Lee’s hands were shaking. He took a steadying breath, then turned back to the kitchen and watched the grains of sand in the hourglass fall and fall and fall.
He poured his father a cup, added cream until it was medium brown, then stirred in two spoonfuls of sugar. Lee made his own coffee exactly the same way, not because he liked it, but because he hated the taste of coffee no matter what it was mixed with, and he might as well make his father think they were alike in this one particular way.
Lee placed the two coffee cups on the table and sat exactly one cushion away from his father on the couch, close enough that the distance felt friendly, but not so close that Lee looked clingy—his father only liked affection if it was quiet.
Lee’s father took a sip and nodded in approval. “Thank you, Lee,” he said, not looking at him.
Lee made a sound of acknowledgment and sipped his own coffee, which tasted like nothing at all. Here, in the silence, Lee let himself pretend that this was enough, that this was fine, that he was the kind of person who could sit and silently drink coffeeand not feel like he was trying to hold back a tsunami from spilling out of his ears, his mouth, his eyes. He would drown the world one day. He was sure of it.
When he sat this close, he could hear his father’s heartbeat.
Too fast, sometimes stuttering, like it was trying to escape from something, someone.
You can’t hear other people’s heartbeats, his father once said. Maybehecouldn’t, but he didn’t know what Lee was capable of. After all, he was sitting here next to Lee, calmly drinking coffee instead of calling the cops to have Lee thrown in jail.
The doctor said his father’s heart condition was under control, but they couldn’t hear what Lee could. They didn’t have the same sense of impending doom that Lee could taste in the air the way animals could sense storms.
When Lee was fourteen and learned that stress could exacerbate his father’s condition, he took it upon himself to block all the news stations from the TV, to sweep up the kitchen and wipe the counters with lavender oil before his father got home from work, making sure his father never tripped over a shoe in the hallway or pulled an expired bottle of dressing from the fridge or had to make his own cup of coffee. Now that Lee was in college, his father’s girlfriend could take care of him, but Lee still made sure to only ever give his father good news, good grades, good behavior.
But there were only so many problems that Lee Turner could snowplow out of his father’s path, because he himself was a problem. The kind that could kill you.
“Is there anything you need in town?” his father asked. “I can drive you a bit later.”
Lee shook his head. It was bad enough that he’d asked to stay with his father while he took a semester off school. He didn’t want to make it worse byneedingthings. He could be like one of those pet turtles that you buried in winter, requiring nothing at all but a place to exist.
“Are you sure?” his father said, frowning. “You didn’t bring much with you.”
Lee realized he had to say something or his father would think he was lying out of politeness. Even when he tried to exist as quietly as possible, he managed to mess up. “Maybe some more socks,” he said. “But I need some sun if I don’t want the jet lag to knock me out before dinner, so I’ll just walk into town. You don’t have to drive me.”
His father smiled and Lee let out a breath—he’d given the right answer.
“It’s a beautiful walk,” his father said. “The South is still so green this time of year.”
“Is that why you moved here?” Lee said.
His father had always said he’d sell the house in New Jersey and move somewhere exotic after Lee went to college, but Lee hadn’t really expected him to do it. Only a week into Lee’s first semester, his father had called to tell him that he and his girlfriend were moving back to her home province in Japan, that he’d found an old country house for cheap and could work remotely anyway, so why not?
At Lee’s question, his father’s smile thinned. “That, and it’s close to Hina’s family,” he said. Then he took a long sip of coffee and looked out the window.
Lee stared at his father’s side profile, the nervous way he swallowed even though he hadn’t taken another sip.
The worst thing about Lee Turner—the part his father hated the most—was that he knew when people lied.
