“There’s something different about this business,” the elderly woman who lived above our shop said.
She made a hobby of calling the police on us. Three times she reported us before we even opened the doors to our coffee shop, her imagination running wild with fears of drunk men throwing bottles or loud music shaking the walls. She even convinced herself we were going to destroy the building, like some villain from an old Soviet nightmare.
Okay, that last one might have been true. Who knew that foot-and-a-half thick piece of concrete in the middle was so essential to the building? She had stumbled upon a moment of justice this time, but did it really justify all the clogging of pipes to flood the shop, spitting on our baristas, and regular storming of the shop with a team of fellow residents?
We’d been running the shop for a few months in Tbilisi, Georgia (the country, not the state). It was a cool summer evening when we finally finished decorating our specialty coffee haven. The walls were lined with faces of people from around the world, a bookshelf of dusty old Russian novels, and a kilim rug that hung above low, Turkish-style seating.
We’d hardly found our niche, balancing the interests of the locals and Persian immigrants who could barely afford a cup of tea and the Russian moguls and Indian medical students whose standards I supposed may be impossible to live up to.
I was across town, picking up a few last touches for the shop when the phone rang. It was Dachi, one of our baristas.
“Sorry Jon,” he started slowly, “we weren’t sure if we should bother you, but the shop is on fire.”
I froze. “Wait, what?!”
