“One morning in 2013, I'm pouring two cups, same as I did every morning,” I say. “The kettle is still ticking as it cools. I set one cup by Rami's usual spot on the counter before I even turn around, out of habit more than thought. I turn around, and Rami's chair is empty. Abu Walid tells me his building was hit the night before. He isn't guessing, and he isn't repeating gossip from the street. He watched it happen from two blocks away, standing in the doorway of his own shop with a broom still in his hand.”
There is just an empty chair where a man used to sit every week, for as long as I had worked there. The seat still holds the shape of him, worn smooth at the edges from years of the same spot. I stop for a second, cup in my hand, steam going nowhere. Ronnie isn't touching his phone anymore. Even Samir has gone quiet in his own chair, like he already recognizes this particular silence.
“That's when I understood something,” I say. “A shared cup of coffee can't protect anyone from a war that has already decided who gets to stay in a city and who doesn't. My father lost his shop once, in Tel Keppe. I told myself that was the end of it: one war, one shop, one hard year. I watched a second one come apart in Syria, with my own hands still smelling like the coffee I'd poured that morning. I understood there was no end of it, not really. There is only the next morning, and who is still there to drink from it.”
Two countries, not one. My family didn't reach Canada until years later, through a resettlement program that pulled refugees out of the Syrian crisis, Syrians and displaced Iraqis both. Officers stamped our papers, screened our names, and told us to wait, then told us again. I was twenty-two when we landed, carrying one suitcase and my father's old pair of scissors wrapped in a towel. I opened this shop four years after that. A business loan and a lot of nerve. And a promise to myself that nobody would ever find an empty chair in my shop without someone noticing.
Next Sunday: Samir looks at Frank and sees something Frank never saw about himself. Chapter 6.
