Samir studies me with something new on his face. It isn't pity. It's recognition. He has the same look he gets right before he pours the first cup on a Thursday. It is the look of someone who already knows how something is going to taste before it touches his tongue.
“You built this place the same way your father built his, Frank,” he says. “You didn't sit down and decide to. You already knew how a shop like this ought to feel. So you made another one, without ever noticing that's what you were doing.”
I hadn't thought of it that way until he said it out loud. I put in two chairs and a bench by the window because that is what a barbershop needs, nothing more deliberate than that. I never once called it rebuilding anything. I never once stood in a hardware store, picking out paint and thought of Baghdad. Or Damascus. Or my father's hands on a broom at closing time. Standing there with burnt coffee still in the sink, though, I know Samir is right. The smell of it still hangs in the back room, sharp enough that I can feel it in my throat
I have built the same room twice now, whether I meant to. Some part of me built it a third time the day I let Samir keep his own hot plate running every Thursday.
Gary sticks his head into the back room, newspaper still folded under his arm. His reading glasses are pushed up on his forehead, like he forgot they were there. He has been listening from the doorway longer than any of us realized, long enough to miss most of his own haircut.
“Tell them about your old man, Ronnie,” Gary says, grinning like he's handing over a good secret he has been saving for weeks. He has wanted to say this out loud since the day Ronnie first sat in that chair.
Ronnie's face goes red in a way I have never seen on him in six years of cutting his hair. He looks at the floor, then at the door, like he is counting the steps it would take to leave without answering. Samir watches him with the same patience he gave the burnt pot ten minutes earlier, waiting for whatever is about to come out. Nobody rushes him. In a shop like this, the quiet before a confession gets the same respect as the coffee does. Even Gary, for once, doesn't fill the silence with a joke.
Next Sunday: Ronnie tells us something he has never told anyone in this shop. Chapter 7.
