"Some doors only swing one way."
Samir shakes his head slowly. "Some doors only swing one way," he says. "I would rather remember him the way I heard him last. Wait. Now. That is enough of an ending for one old man."
Something about hearing Samir say it out loud loosens something in me. I have worked in this shop for six years and told almost nobody where I am from beyond a single word. Iraq. People nod and let it go, and I have always let them.
"I understand this better than you think," I say.
Samir looks at me the way a man looks at someone about to say something true for the first time.
"My father had a barbershop in Tel Keppe, a small town just north of Mosul," I say. "Two chairs, like this one. Two of his regulars had been coming every week for twenty years, a Sunni man and a Shia man, sitting side by side. My father made their coffee too strong on purpose, the way they both liked it. In 2007, when I was ten, Christians around Mosul started being targeted, and my father sent us to Syria before the summer was over. We thought it would be a year. Maybe two."
I tell them about Jaramana, a Damascus suburb full of Iraqi families who had made the same bet mine did. I apprenticed at a barbershop there under a man named Abu Walid, sweeping hair at twelve, cutting hair for real by fifteen. He kept a coffee pot going all day. It never once sat empty from open to close.
He had two regulars of his own by then. A Syrian man named Rami, who had been coming for years and always tipped in small coins he pressed into my hand like a secret. And me, staff on paper, yet close enough to family that Abu Walid poured my coffee before he poured anyone else's.
Coffee was the one thing that didn't change no matter which country I woke up in. My mother made it the way her mother had: thick and dark in a small brass pot. It tasted the same in Damascus as it had in Tel Keppe.
"One morning in 2013, I'm pouring two cups, same as I did every morning," I say. "I turn around, and Rami's chair is empty."
Next Sunday: what happened to Rami, and why Frank has built the same room twice. Chapter 5 arrives Sunday at 6 PM.
