"Watch the colour and you will ruin it. Listen, and you will know exactly when."
The pot is a mess, black coffee sludge climbing the sides, the room smelling like a fire that caught and then gave up. Samir stares at it the way a man stares at an old photograph he wasn't ready to find.
"That's not coffee, that's a burned bean and a wasted morning," he says.
"I'll clean up the coffee," I tell him. He is already scraping it into the sink. Something in the way his hands move tells me this was never really about the pot.
"You want to know how I learned to smell a good roast," Samir says. It isn't really a question. He leans against the counter. Ronnie sits on an overturned bucket, and I stay in the doorway with my scissors still in my hand.
"I was sixteen," Samir says. "Beirut, 1976. I worked for a man named Abu Khalil, in a shop that sold coffee, meat, and whatever else the street needed that week. He never smiled at me. He never once said a kind word to anyone in the nine months I worked for him."
He tells us about the roaster, an old drum turned by hand over a low flame. Abu Khalil taught him to listen instead of watching the beans. Watch the colour and you will ruin it, the old man used to say. Listen, and you will know exactly when.
Samir learned to grind the beans fine as sand. He learned to pour the water off the boil at exactly the right second, so the foam rose but never spilled. No regular at the counter ever complained about the coffee. That was Abu Khalil's whole reputation, built cup by cup. Samir carried it out of the country in his hands, even after everything else was gone.
Next Sunday: Wait Now, One last morning at the shop, and three seconds that felt like three hundred. Chapter 3 arrives Sunday at 6 PM.
