Lee tensed up, nearly dropping the grinder. He realized it was now silent as he spun the handle, all the beans transformed into powder, none of them growling through the blades. He turned to his father, who was sitting on the couch and reading while he waited for Lee to finish making coffee. It was early morning, and Lee had woken to the sound of his father shuffling around the kitchen, which was Lee’s cue to make his coffee.
“Just daydreaming,” Lee said. “I need coffee before I can think about the real world.”
“Amen,” his father said, turning back to his book.
Lee finished making the coffees and set them down on the table, then sat with his father, wedging himself onto the side of the couch, as far as possible from his father’s incessantly loud watch.
His father picked up his coffee, took a long sip, and made an appreciative sound before turning to Lee. “So, what’s her name?” he asked.
Lee choked on his coffee.
He didn’t have to ask who his father was talking about. The moment his father had seen Sen, Lee had panicked and rambled too much, and now his father probably thought he was into swordplay.
“Sen,” Lee said, hoping his clipped tone discouraged his father from probing.
“Sen,” his father echoed, nodding as if he approved of her name. “Is she a student?”
Lee couldn’t understand why his father wanted to talk about this. They never talked about women. But then again, Lee had never had a girlfriend to talk about. “Not at the moment,” he said. And then, sensing that his father wouldn’t be happy if he left it at that: “Her family owns several old katanas. I told her I was interested and she brought one to show me. We weren’t using it for anything weird.”
His father laughed. Lee was so startled by the sound that for a moment he couldn’t hear the ticking watch anymore. Lee ran back his last sentence in his mind but couldn’t pinpoint what was so funny about it.
“Lee, it’s fine,” his father said, his smile warm behind the steam spiraling from his coffee. “I’m happy for you. You never really took an interest in girls, so I thought—”
“I never took an interest inanyone,” Lee said.
“Your life will be easier this way,” his father continued, as if he hadn’t spoken. “People can be very judgmental.”
Lee clenched his jaw, his fingertips burning from how hard he was gripping the mug.
There was nothingeasyabout Lee Turner’s life. He was a killer, a criminal, a freak, supposedly smart but with no degree to show for it, convalescing with the ghost in his closet... and yet his father was proud of him because he wasn’tgay?
Part of Lee wished he’d started hanging out with girls sooner, just so his dad would have looked at him with that same fondness earlier. And the other part of him wanted to pour his scalding coffee over his father’s face so he would stop smiling, stop looking at him so damn proudly, as if he understood Lee at all.
“I’m sure you’ll have fun while you’re in Japan,” his father said, smirking like they were sharing a disgusting secret. “Japanese girls are special.”
“Special?” Lee echoed, the word like rotting tree bark in his mouth.
His father nodded and leaned closer, as if afraid Hina would hear from across the house. “It’s fine to have preferences. Some people will tell you it’s not, but it is.”
Lee went completely still. He felt like he was in middle school again, with all his friends acting like he was some sort of snake charmer just because he knew some Japanese. They’d pushed him at Akemi—the one Japanese girl in their grade, who Lee had never even spoken to before and definitely couldn’t approach after all his friends practically ambushed her at her locker.
Asian girls are the best, his friend Matt had said.They’re smalleverywhere.
At the time, Lee hadn’t really understood what Matt meant. Now, with his father smiling knowingly at him like they finally had a shared interest, Lee wanted to yank his father’s eyes out and smash them on the floor. That wasn’t how he thought of his dad’s girlfriends, and that wasn’t how he saw Sen. Sen was so much more important than a girlfriend—she was his ticket to the land of the dead.
Lee didn’t often feel angry at his father, who had such a perpetually calm voice and gentle eyes. But now, Lee was having a hard time forcing his facial expression into something polite. It wouldn’t make his father happy if he knew Lee was doing everything in his power to find his mother’s murderer, but somehow it thrilled him to think Lee was fucking an Asian girl.
“If that’s yourpreference, then why did you marry Mom?” Lee asked. He didn’t try hard enough to filter the bitterness from his tone, and he realized his mistake when his father’s heartbeat suddenly sped up. His father grimaced and massaged his chest.
“Marriage is different,” he said. “The kind of girl you date isn’t always the kind of girl you marry. I mean, how could you marry a woman who doesn’t speak English?”
He laughed, and Lee realized too late that he was supposed to laugh too, but he couldn’t quite conjure the sound.
“But you speak Japanese,” Lee said to cover up his mistake, hoping it sounded like a compliment and not an accusation.
His father laughed again, but this time it was a lie. “You’re better than me at this point,” he said, clapping Lee on the shoulder. Too hard, and Lee winced as his shoulder clicked, but his father seemed not to notice. “Explains why it didn’t take you long to find a pretty girl.”
A pretty girl, Lee thought. When Lee looked at Sen, his mind blurred with a whirlpool of questions: Why was she trained as a samurai, even though women traditionally weren’t? Why had she confronted someone she thought was a ghost? Why hadn’t she killed him on sight? But his father saw a woman wielding a katana in Lee’s room at night, and his only thought was that she was pretty.
