The Empty Chair | Chapter 1 | The Scorched Pot
"Thursdays smell like coffee."
I am three inches into a fade when the smell reaches the front of the shop. Burnt coffee, sharp and black, drifting out of the back room where Samir keeps a hot plate running every Thursday morning before anyone else gets in. I know that smell. It means somebody let the pot go too long.
Samir is in chair two, half a haircut done, grey hair clipped clean on one side and still shaggy on the other. He is a seventy-five-year-old refugee from Lebanon who has spent half a century in this country. In that moment, though, he stands up like a man whose name just got called across a crowded room. The cape slides off his shoulders and lands on the floor.
"Sit, Samir," my sister and fellow barber says. "I'm not finished."
He is already walking.
I own this shop. Everyone calls me Frank. It's easier than the name on my license, and I never minded the trade. Two chairs, a bench by the window, a brass coffee pot that only Samir gets to touch on Thursdays. Half of my regulars came to this country as refugees from places most Canadians only see on the news. The other half were born three blocks from my shop.
On a Thursday morning, you might find Gary, a retired mechanic, reading yesterday's sports section out loud to whoever will listen. A Somali teenager waiting for his little brother's turn in the chair. A young woman from Manila who drops off her husband's dry cleaning next door. She ducks in just to say hello, sometimes in three languages before she leaves again.
Most mornings the shop smells of hair tonic and nothing much else. Thursdays smell like coffee. Samir insists on making a pot for the regulars before his own haircut starts. He brews it in a small brass rakweh with a long handle, and he grinds a few cardamom pods in with the coffee every time. When it's ready, he pours slowly, a little into each cup and then back around again, so everyone gets some of the foam. He has done it every week since he first wandered in off the street three years ago and never really left. People joke that this place is the United Nations of haircuts. Nobody has ever argued the point.
Ronnie is in my chair, half a beard trimmed, phone face down on his knee. He has been coming here every three weeks for six years. He talks about hockey and traffic and almost nothing else. I have cut his hair close to a hundred times and never asked him a real question. Until Samir stood up like that, it had never struck me as strange.
I follow Samir to the back. Ronnie follows me, still wearing half a beard.
Next Sunday: Samir explains how he learned to smell a good roast, and talks about the man who never once smiled at him. Chapter 2 arrives Sunday at 6 PM.
