The Turpentine Incident
By Jeff Eckenrode
The customer leaned across the counter toward Old Pete like he was about to place a very serious order, paint-flecked overalls and a tool belt still slung low on his hips like he'd walked straight off a job site.
"I need something high in turpentine," he said. "Heard it's what gives the good stuff that real kick."
Pete blinked at him. "Turpentine?"
"Yeah. My buddy swears by it. High turpentine content, real loud flavor."
Pete opened his mouth, closed it again, and did the thing he did whenever a conversation exceeded his jurisdiction, which was leave.
He found me in the back office counting wheat pennies at my desk.
"Umm... Roz, there's a guy up front asking for turpentine," he said, with the flat urgency of a man reporting a small fire he didn't start.
"The paint thinner?" I asked, pausing momentarily so I could be absolutely sure I didn't misunderstand what Pete had just said.
"That's what I said. He seemed very sure about it."
I got up from my desk and went up front, mostly out of curiosity, and found the man still leaning on the counter with the confidence of someone who'd never once been wrong about anything.
He pulled a rag from his back pocket, the same rag that had probably wiped up actual turpentine at some point in its life, and dabbed at his hands with it while he waited, entirely unaware of the irony of the circumstance.
"You're looking for turpentine?" I said.
"High turpentine content, yeah." the man replied.
"Turpentine's a paint solvent. You strip furniture with it. It is, categorically, not something you want a high content of in anything you're about to smoke."
He frowned, first at me, then at the shelf, like the shelf might back him up. "That's not what my buddy said."
Nope. This was, I decided, above my patience for the day, and also possibly above my expertise, since I was fairly certain there was a real word buried somewhere under whatever his buddy had told him.
I went and got Berny from the backroom where she was moving boxes.
She arrived at the counter already wearing the smile she used for situations that were about to be fixed with one sentence.
"You mean terpenes?" she said. "T-E-R-P-E-N-E-S. Not turpentine!"
"That‘s not the same thing?" the man asked with genuine confusion in his eyes, still absently working the rag between his fingers.
"It's actually related," Berny said, delighted in the specific way she got delighted by trivia.
"See, the word terpene literally comes from turpentine. Turpentine's made from pine resin, and pine resin's full of the same kind of aromatic compounds, terpenes, that give cannabis its smell and flavor. So you're not wrong that they're connected. You're just about a hundred years and one letter off from what you actually want!"
The man considered this, visibly recalibrating, the same slow reboot Pete tended to do when a dearly held belief quietly collapsed in front of him. He glanced down at the rag in his hands like it had just testified against him.
"So I don't want the turpentine?"
"You do not want the turpentine," Berny said, soberly.
"But I do want the terpenes?"
"There it is!" Berny exclaimed, positively beaming with enthusiasm for the man's sudden epiphany.
On the surface, the man looked mildly betrayed by his own vocabulary, the way a fella looks when he realizes he's been mispronouncing a word for years and everyone let him. He stuffed the rag back into his pocket like he no longer trusted it to behave itself.
"My buddy's going to hear about this," he said, already pulling out his phone.
Pete watched him go, arms crossed, deeply unbothered by having contributed nothing to his own rescue.
"I did technically solve that," Old Pete said. "I mean, I found the person who solved it."
"That counts for something," I said.
"Does it?" Pete asked.
"Nope!” Berny said cheerfully, already walking away.
