THE CHIEFEST AND GREATEST OF CALAMITIES
Steam belched and hissed. Sweat trickled down the back of my neck.
Smaug the Terrible was furious with me.
“What does it mean, ‘filter error’?” I asked.
“Here.” Mr. Apatan wiggled the hose where it fed into Smaug’s gleaming chrome back. The blinking red error light went dark. “Better?”
“I think so.”
Smaug gurgled happily and began boiling once again.
“Good. Were you pushing buttons?”
“No,” I said. “Just to check the temperature.”
“You don’t have to check it, Darius. It always stays at two- twelve.”
“Right.”
There was no use arguing with Charles Apatan, Manager of the Tea Haven at the Shoppes at Fairview Court. He was convinced, despite all the articles I printed out for him—he refused to read web pages—that each and every tea should be steeped at a full boil, whether it was a robust Yunnan or a fragile gyokuro.
Not that Tea Haven ever got such fine teas. Everything we sold wasenriched with antioxidantsorenhanced with natural super-fruit extractsorformulated for health and beauty.
Smaug, the Irrepressibly Finicky, was our industrial-strengthwater boiler. I named it Smaug my first week on the job, when I got scalded three times in a single shift, but so far the name hadn’t stuck with anyone else at Tea Haven.
Mr. Apatan passed me an empty pump-action thermos. “We need more Blueberry Açai Bliss.”
I shoveled tea from the bright orange tin into the filter basket, topped it with two scoops of rock sugar, and tucked it under the spigot. Smaug, the Unassailably Pressurized, spat its steaming contents into the thermos. I flinched as boiling water spattered my hands.
Smaug, the Chiefest and Greatest of Calamities, was triumphant once more.
As a people group, Persians are genetically predisposed to like tea. And even though I was only half Persian, I had inherited a full-strength tea-loving gene sequence from my mom.
“You know how Persians make tea?” my mom would ask.
“How?” I would say.
“We put hell in it and we damn it,” she would say, and I would laugh because it was funny to hear my mom, who never used colorful metaphors, pretend to curse.
In Farsi,helmeans “cardamom,” which is what makes Persian tea so delicious, anddammeans “to steep.”
When I explained the joke to Mr. Apatan, he was not amused.
“You can’t swear at the customers, Darius,” he said.
“I wasn’t going to. It’s Farsi. It’s a joke.”
“You can’t do that.”
Charles Apatan was the most literal person I knew.
After I replenished our strategically located sample thermoses with fresh tea, I refilled the plastic cups at each station.
I was categorically opposed to plastic sample cups. Everything tasted gross out of plastic, all chemical-y and bland.
It was deeply disgusting.
