The Smell of Coffee and Cigarettes

Leonard Frist kept his important things in the top drawer of his dresser, and although his son, Harold, had never been told not to open it, he never did open it until that September morning in 1999, almost seventeen years after his father’s death. Harold stood as a middle-aged man in front of his father’s dresser as he had seen his father standing before it innumerable times using the mirror at its back to knot his tie each morning, smelling of coffee and cigarettes

Leonard was a small, handsome man, claiming to be five foot six, but probably was closer to 5'4". He wore his black hair—with its tight curls—in a crew cut that gave him the look of a retired career military man. Harold was taller and broader than Leonard, but that did not make him feel any stronger than his father, perhaps a match on a good day, but no stronger. A quality that indelibly marked them as father and son was their distinctive way of squinting their eyes, which lifted their upper lip and creased their brow, making it appear as if they were peering into glaring light, never quite seeming to focus on what they were looking at.

During Harold’s childhood, neither he nor his father learned very much about the other. There had been stories about Leonard that Harold had been told, mostly by his mother, only one of which stood out: his mother had died of an accidental overdose of sleeping pills.

After Leonard’s death, when Harold thought of his father, what came to mind was a single image from a photograph in which Leonard is seated on a kitchen chair beside a yellow Formica table. His right arm is outstretched on the table, toward the camera, holding his horn-rimmed glasses. In his other hand, held below the table almost out of sight, is a cigarette he is holding between two fingers, with a long ash ready to drop to the floor.

On opening the top drawer of the dark cedar dresser that September morning, Harold found a number of things, fewer than he’d expected, some labeled with worn paper tags with a few