✷
The line for Peregrine Teas stretched down the pier toward the ocean, disappearing into the morning fog.
The crowds were not unusual, not anymore. People had been clustering outside the red-shingled cottage in growing numbers ever since Travelist Magazine crowned the little shop on Camden’s coast “The Most Magical Teahouse in Maine.” They clogged the narrow brick streets as they posed for pictures, their arms weighed down by shopping bags and souvenirs.
Things had been different when Daniel first stepped over the store’s front stoop last fall. A graduate-school dropout perpetually low on cash, he’d been drawn to the Help Wanted sign posted in the window. He’d heard of Peregrine, of course, the eclectic shack at the edge of the boardwalk steeped in local lore. The shop seemed to slip in and out of the mist, its operating hours unconventional and almost impossible to predict.
Back then, stumbling across Peregrine Teas was like finding a sea-tossed treasure in the sand.
Inside the shop, the magic was palpable. It hovered over wobbly tables and filled the air with lilac sweetness. That first visit, Daniel had ordered an orange-spiked maté, declared by the chalkboard menu as the daily special. Then, he’d settled into a cracked leather armchair and took a sip from the steaming mug in his hands.
As piquant notes of caramelized citrus danced across Daniel's tongue, the dusty shop disappeared, replaced by a breathtaking vista. An ochrous sun sank low behind a craggy mountain range. Miles of rolling pasture spread out before him, visible through the panoramic windows of the ranch in which he stood. The vision was so intense, Daniel could reach out and feel the rough-hewn fibers of a tapestry hanging on a ruddy clay wall. He smelled bonfire smoke tinged with syrupy agave and heard the braying of donkeys being led into their pen for the night.
All too soon, the gritty dregs of tea coated his tongue, and he'd opened his eyes to the store’s bowing walls. As he returned his empty mug to the plastic bin on the counter, Daniel realized that he loved this shop more than anyplace else in the world.
Even now, as he weaved in and out of the tourists blocking the path to Peregrine’s door, Daniel still did.
“Good morning, Kate,” he said, nudging the door open with his hip. The bell chimed softly, its timbre dulled by the soggy, salty air.
“Big crowd today,” Kate said. Her spiky, black hair was dotted with pastel bobby pins. She climbed atop a rusted step stool and plucked dried chrysanthemums from a bundle hanging in the rafters. “Grab me a bowl, will you?”
Daniel retrieved a stone mortar from behind the counter. As Kate muttered enchantments over the ingredients she’d collected, he removed a handkerchief-wrapped parcel from his coat pocket and slipped his apron over his head.
“The water’s probably ready,” Kate said, pausing in her casting to nod toward the kitchen. On cue, the mismatched assortment of tea kettles whistled a dissident chorus.
Daniel stuffed the handkerchief behind Peregrine’s ancient cash register and spared a cursory glance at the menu on the chalkboard.
“Another rose garden,” he observed, reaching for the handle of a kettle on the back burner.
“You got any better ideas?” Kate grabbed a pinch of pink peppercorns to add to her bowl. “We’re practically drowning in flower petals.”
Daniel laughed. Kate was a skilled alchemist, but he knew how constrained she felt in crafting the shop’s tamer blends. If she had her way, every cup would transport its drinker to a snowy mountain or tropical coral reef. But garden teas were consistently the shop's top sellers, so Kate had learned to curb her tastes to better match the clientele.
When Daniel finished emptying and refilling the kettles, he returned to the front of the store.
“Want to tell me what you’re doing with this?” Kate asked. She tossed the handkerchief at Daniel, a sour look on her face.
Catching the bundle, Daniel cursed his carelessness. To the untrained eye, the shop had the organization of an overturned cabinet of curiosities, but Kate could instantly tell when something didn’t belong.
“We’ve already talked about this,” she said. “You know the rules.”
Daniel did know the rules. As a student, he had loved rules. He was a sucker for a well-written syllabus or a clearly presented rubric. But while notebooks could be trained into order with a few to-do lists and Post-It flags, life wasn’t always so malleable.
Sometimes, life offered an uninspired grad student a free DNA test.
The results were scant, but they were more than Daniel had ever hoped to have.
And so, that September, Daniel broke the rules he’d so carefully set for himself. He walked out the door of Grisham Labs and drove east in search of a miracle. In search of his family, by way of answers. He didn’t know if the prospect of finding nothing or everything terrified him more. But he knew he’d made the right decision.
He felt the same way now.
Daniel slipped the handkerchief and its precious contents into the front pocket of his apron and took a deep breath, ready to make his case.
“I toasted the rice on my stove last night, just like you showed me,” he said. “And my friend even smuggled some oolong through Customs when he came back from Guangzhou.”
Normally, this last detail would result in an avalanche of questions from Kate. That woman could just as happily spend a morning discussing tea-leaf oxidation as she could spout off a thesis-worthy spiel on the draconian oppression of Western bureaucracy. Instead, she just shook her head.
“I don’t do memory magic,” she said as she headed toward the door.
Daniel followed close on her heels. “I started with my birthday,” he said. “It’s in April, but it was cold that year, so I froze a handful of lotus petals and crushed them while they were still coated in ice.”
He rushed on before Kate had a chance to interrupt, before he chickened out under the scrutiny of her glare. “The test I took back in college listed three cities where I’m most likely from. So, I mapped it out and found that wolfberries are native to the region. I’ve added just the right amount; more than three and you overpower the florals. Steep for two minutes, forty-three seconds, or else the tea gets too bitter.”
Daniel paused and exhaled. “See? I’ve thought of everything.”
For a moment, he thought he’d won her over. Though she did not have the formal academic training that Daniel had abandoned, Kate had a professorial appreciation for research done well.
The seconds stretched on, viscous as molasses.
“You know I can’t do this alone, Kate,” Daniel said. “Please say you’ll help me.”
His words shattered the tenuous spell hanging over the shop.
“No,” Kate said simply.
She pulled the door open, and the day began.
✷
Daniel’s first weeks at Peregrine had been difficult. Kate was an exacting teacher who had a reputation for scaring away new hires with her peculiar processes and high standards.
For half a month, Daniel did nothing but follow Kate around, watching, taking notes, and never touching anything, not a single mug or spoon. Each day after the shop closed, he stayed in Peregrine’s cramped kitchen, standing under an inverted garden of drying herbs as Kate taught the basics of distilling the sights and sounds of a place into the taste and smell of a tea.
Eventually, the two of them fell into a comforting rhythm. They learned to maneuver around each other in the cramped space and to anticipate each other’s needs. Their practiced routine anchored them against an ever-rising tide of tourists that passed through the store, growing in numbers as more and more learned of the magic tea that could transport you to distant lands in a single sip.
Once the store opened each morning, the work became less about spellcrafting and more about crowd management. Kate typically took orders and counted change while Daniel heated water and made small talk with the customers.
The woman who now stood across from him was particularly chatty. “You must love your job. Working here every day,” she said. “I would feel so lucky.” As she spoke, she fiddled with a large camera slung over her shoulder.
“It’s been a welcome change from the chem lab at IU,” Daniel said. He scooped a spoonful of tea into an empty sachet. It was a spicy mixture of mesquite-smoked rooibos with pieces of candied papaya that glinted like jewels. As it steeped, the water turned the color of a desert rose.
“I would just be so tempted all the time,” the woman continued, training her lens at the glass jars lining the counter. “You have a gateway to the world on these shelves. You could go anywhere!”
Daniel assessed the truth of this statement. He could go anywhere, from a sunny patio in Toulouse to the misty pine forests of the Pacific Northwest. But without Kate’s blessing—or, more accurately, the magic she sprinkled into each tea—the one place he needed to go was hopelessly out of reach. Without her magic, all he had in his apron pocket was a handful of tea leaves and a few grains of rice.
“My husband wanted to take me to Tanzania on our honeymoon,” the woman said. She had lowered her camera, and her fingers worried the strap. “This camera was his. But silly me insisted on going to Chicago, where I spent the entire week shopping the Magnificent Mile. I was happy with my decision then. But now that he’s gone, I wish we could’ve done this trip together.”
Something in Daniel’s chest tightened as he handed the cup across the counter. The woman buried her nose in the fragrant steam. “Oh, this smells divine,” she said.
“You’ll have until your cup is empty or until the water cools, whichever comes first,” Daniel interrupted before she could take a sip. “It usually lasts about an hour.”
“That will be more than enough time.” The woman’s eyes sparkled, though whether it was from anticipation or an effect of the magic, Daniel didn’t know.
Setting the cup down, the woman reached into her pocket and withdrew a small glass jar. When she unscrewed the lid, the smell of clover honey wafted through the air.
“My husband was a beekeeper. He made his own honey every year. I was wondering—” The widow looked down at the container clutched in her hand. “If I added this, I could see him, yes?”
Daniel considered the honey, pooled inside the jar like liquid amber. From what he’d learned, Kate’s magic thrived on specificity. Choosing the right leaves, the precise species of flower or mushroom, was the difference between getting a traveler to the summit of Mount Everest or stranded somewhere in the Himalayas.
“It might work," Daniel said. "But Kate's very particular about people adding things to her teas—”
The woman ignored Daniel’s warning and upended the jar over her cup. The honey poured into the water in a thin stream of gold.
“Hey! Stop that,” Kate said. She abandoned her post behind the register, her expression a roiling storm. “We don’t do memory magic here.”
The widow’s face flushed. “I’m sorry,” she stammered. “I just thought—”
Daniel took the cup from her hands and set it aside.
Drawing a fresh sachet from a drawer, Kate filled a new mug with water. She handed it over the counter with a curt, “Your tea, ma’am,” before pushing past Daniel without another word.
✷
The rest of the day passed in a flurry of activity. Daniel spent his time rushing to and from the kitchen, heating water and filling infusers with spiced Darjeeling and fruity senchas. By mid-afternoon, even the lavender Earl Grey was almost gone, its creamy floral undertones whisking travelers off to a mossy alcove in a quiet abbey.
On any other day, the busy flow of customers would have been more than enough to make Daniel forget anything that was troubling him. He found it easy to lose himself in the pattern of it all; the whistle of kettles, the clinking of glasses, the soft sigh of the tea leaves as they unfurled.
But today, he remained distracted, the conversations with Kate and the beekeeper’s widow replaying in his mind.
“That might be a new store record,” Kate said as she flipped the sign on the door to “closed.” They’d sold out for the third time that week, with a line of disappointed customers still wrapped halfway around the block. “Let’s clean up quick and head out.”
Daniel hesitated. Kate looked so tired, and he considered letting the matter go, coming back to it another day.
But then he reached into his apron. His fingers brushed the bunny-eared bundle in his pocket as he looked around the shop. Dust motes swirled in the early-evening light. A busted cake stand poked out from behind a stack of empty tea tins. He’d lost count of how many times they’d argued about throwing that junk away. Once, he’d stayed late and packed it all up in a box. When he arrived at work the next morning, Kate had already put everything back in a pile on the shelf.
Daniel knew that nothing would be different. Not tomorrow, or the next day, or the next.
He took a deep breath, squeezing the sachet as if it were a holy relic that could grant him strength. He smelled the oolong’s saccharine earthiness seeping through the fabric.
“The widow’s honey would’ve worked, you know,” he said. “Her husband collected it. That would’ve been enough.”
Kate sighed and set the mug she had been drying down on the counter.
“Maybe. Probably. But if it had, what then?” she said. “She gets an hour with her husband and then comes back, the pain of loss even fresher than before?”
Kate shook her head and began scrubbing a crumb-speckled saucer with extra vigor. “The magic of this shop hands people a world to explore. The last thing I want is for them to waste it. I’ve seen what happens. They become fixated, stuck. Tourists of their own memories.”
Daniel had heard all of this before. Rarely a day went by without someone inquiring about returning to a specific moment in time through the magic of Kate’s tea. He could see how this bugged her, how their insistence stung, how they questioned her judgment and expertise.
But the way the widow spoke of her husband that afternoon had shaken something loose inside of Daniel. Her grief was raw and desperate, the memory of the man she’d lost as tangible as the jar of honey she’d cradled in her hands.
Daniel’s loss was different, incorporeal, like a wisp of steam escaping from a teacup. He grieved for a family he’d never even gotten a chance to know.
Perhaps this was something Kate could understand.
“Mine’s not a memory,” he said.
Kate stared at him, her shrewd eyes red-rimmed and flinty.
“What?” she asked.
“I don’t remember anything. My birth parents, they’re not memories. Not really.” The sharp edge of a grain of rice poked through the handkerchief, pricking Daniel’s palm. “I know it might not work. But I can’t not try.”
“What can you possibly learn from these people who are practically strangers?” Kate asked, though not unkindly. “You’ve had a good life. Why taint your future by fixating on the past?”
The answer was ready on Daniel’s tongue. “I don’t know what my future is without understanding this part of my past.”
Kate was quiet. But, for the first time since he’d broached this subject a month ago, she seemed to be listening.
“Come on, Kate,” Daniel said. “There has to be… Surely, you’ve felt this way about something, too.”
Daniel’s hopes plummeted as he saw something shutter behind Kate’s eyes. She picked up a pile of plates and left the room as if he had never spoken.
Deep down, Daniel knew she wouldn’t get it. His thesis advisor hadn’t, nor his roommates, who were more concerned with finding a new tenant to fill his third of the rent. His parents had yelled at him when he announced that he was leaving school. Then they’d cried, twisting Daniel's desire to find his birth family and making it about themselves. His brother still refused to return his calls.
Yet the sting of Kate’s rejection was the worst of them all.
For most of his life, Daniel had dismissed the idea of finding his family as an impossible fantasy. It was easy to feel that way when he was surrounded by lab coats and beakers and rules and reason. But here, in a shop made famous for its magic, he foolishly hoped that it would be different.
Daniel felt the disappointment and frustration boil over inside of him. He tossed the handkerchief onto the counter. His aim was off, and it hit the granite edge and rolled under the stove. He didn’t bother to retrieve it. Without Kate’s magic, it was as useless as the overflowing bag of trash he grabbed from the kitchen and hauled outside.
No exotic destination awaited him when he shouldered through the shop’s door. It was just the back alley, smelling of sour garbage and wet pavement.
Daniel sat on the back step and buried his head in his hands. The simmering rage he’d felt in the kitchen had cooled, leaving his insides as numb as his fingers and toes in the late-autumn air. Somewhere in the distance, a foghorn blared, the echo of its moan ricocheting off the bricks and stones. In the waning evening light, a wedge of Canada geese passed overhead, their wings propelling them toward a destination that did not require magic tea to reach.
When he could bear the chill no longer, Daniel returned to the warm embrace of the shop. Inside, the kitchen was dark, the burners switched off, the kettles and mugs returned to their rightful places. Kate had finished her closing rituals and ducked out the front door, not even bothering to say goodbye. Daniel didn’t know how they’d get through the next day with this prickly awkwardness between them.
He was halfway out the door himself when he noticed an errant mug abandoned on the counter. It sat on a checkered square of fabric, the dark liquid inside piping hot. The steam emanating from its scalding surface smelled of roasted grain and sweet fruit.
Daniel smiled.
Gripping the mug’s handle, he walked to the back corner of the shop, sat down in a well-worn armchair, and took a sip.
✷
Amanda Etchison is a former journalist and writer who works in nonprofit advocacy and communications. She lives with her husband in Ohio, where she plays French Horn in local theatre productions and serves as a human landing pad for her cat, Waffles. Find her at amandaetchison.com.
