By Jeff Eckenrode

The man had been in the shop eleven minutes and had already interrupted four separate customers.

"That one's weaker than the label says," he told a woman holding a jar of something orange-named, tapping the side of his own nose like he'd just performed a magic trick.

"Trust me. I can smell potency. Forty years of practice."

The woman looked at the jar, then at him, then set it down like it had disappointed her.

Berny found me in the back before I'd finished my coffee. "There's a man out front doing something strange,” she said, which from Berny counted as an emergency.

The man's name was Roland. He told me this unprompted, along with his theory, which involved terpenes, a distant cousin who'd once worked at a distillery, and a nose he described as "basically an instrument." He said "basically an instrument" the way some men say "I own the building."

He'd already redirected two more customers by the time I got out there. One of them looked genuinely relieved to be saved from a grave purchasing mistake that didn't actually exist.

Old Pete watched this from behind the counter with the patient stillness of a man waiting for a kettle he already knew was going to whistle. His beard was trimmed halfway to neat, same as always. The yellow light from the fixture above caught the top of his scalp, bald and sun-worn, like it'd been polished by forty years of Mondays.

"Roland," Pete said, not looking up from what he was doing. His eyes had that sharp, amused look they got right before he ruined someone's whole week. "You smell the jar or the outside of the jar?"

Roland blinked. "The jar."

"Sealed jar."

"Sealed, yeah."

"So you're smelling glass."

Roland opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again like a man recalculating a route that had just been closed for construction.

"Forty years," Pete added, still not looking up, "and I still can't smell through glass. Feels like something you'd mention."

Roland left without buying anything, which felt less like a loss and more like population control.

Berny straightened the jars he'd been reordering by feel and instinct. "Do you think he believed it? The nose thing?"

"People believe a lot of things that make them the most interesting person in a room," I said.

"Do you believe things like that?"

I didn't answer. I was thinking about a 1909-S VDB penny I'd never held and probably never would, and how sure I was, without evidence, that I'd know it on sight.

I suppose some noses just work differently than others.

The Nose Knows