Bliss
Kathryn Littlewood
“It was the summer Rosemary Bliss turned ten that she saw her mother fold a lightning bolt into a bowl of batter and learned – beyond the shadow of a doubt – that her parents made magic in the Bliss Bakery.” – A delicious new novel for girls, the first in a trilogy.The Bliss family cook book is a closely guarded secret. Centuries old and filled with magical recipes, it has been used for years to keep things running smoothly in the town of Calamity Falls. But when eleven-year-old Rose Bliss and her three siblings are left in charge of the family bakery, one magical mishap follows another until the town is in utter chaos!Treat yourself to big helping of this hilarious magical adventure.
Dedication (#u74a68b6c-2753-5e31-9697-3f9c4750a3ab)
For Ted
Contents
Cover (#u279158c1-ac62-5403-b1f0-fc13daf8a012)
Title Page (#ufe02e4bb-c945-5a74-93e1-46e2fced8c00)
Dedication
Prologue - A Pinch of Magic (#uaa329116-965d-5923-bf6b-fc1bfd3be4ac)
Chapter 1 - Calamity Falls (#u92631afa-8e84-54e9-bb2c-5d34257ef69e)
Chapter 2 - A Hammer Falls (#uf0638c2d-0ce2-5308-8334-ceba2d6e9a64)
Chapter 3 - A Mysterious Stranger (#ub73c18fd-e774-532a-b81e-e04003d48a40)
Chapter 4 - Aunt Lily Helps Out (#u35cab2d7-ff30-5f3c-8d54-53cba2579ade)
Chapter 5 - The Cookery Booke (#u96973cd8-33d4-5a3e-bc84-ec876c839a24)
Chapter 6 - Recipe the First: Love Muffins (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 7 - Recipe the Second: Cookies of Truth (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 8 - Truth and Consequences (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 9 - Love from on High (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 10 - You Scream, I Scream (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 - Recipe the Third: Turn-Around-Inside- Out-Upside-Down Cake (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 - Lying to Aunt Lily (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 - Esrever Ni (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 - A New Cook in the Kitchen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 - Recipe the Fourth: Back-to-Before Blackberry Torte (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 - Sunrise, Sunset (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 - Homecoming (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 - Disappearing Acts (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgments
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
IT WAS THE summer Rosemary Bliss turned ten that she saw her mother fold a lightning bolt into a bowl of batter and learned – beyond the shadow of a doubt – that her parents made magic in the Bliss bakery.
It was the month the youngest Calhoun child, six-year-old Kenny, had wandered into an open relay room at the train station, touched the wrong knob, and nearly been electrocuted. The charge hadn’t killed him outright. It was just powerful enough to make his hair stand on end and to land him in the hospital.
When Rose’s mother, Purdy, heard about Kenny’s coma, she closed the bakery, saying, “This is no time for cookies,” and then she set to work in the kitchen. She couldn’t be drawn away for food or sleep. Nights passed and still she worked. Rose’s father, Albert, watched Rose’s siblings, while Rose begged her mother to help in the kitchen. But Rose was sent to do errands instead – to town for extra flour or dark chocolate or Tahitian vanilla.
Finally, late Sunday evening, as the fiercest storm they’d had all summer lashed Calamity Falls with thunder, lightning and heavy rain that pounded the roof like handfuls of flung gravel, Purdy made an announcement: “It’s time.”
“We can’t leave the children,” Albert said. “Not in a storm like this one.”
Purdy nodded sharply. “Then I guess we have no choice but to bring them all along.” She turned and shouted upstairs, “Field trip, everyone!”
Rose hiccupped with excitement as her father packed her and her brothers and baby sister into the family’s minivan, along with a large mason jar made out of worn blue glass.
Wind and rain rocked the van on its wheels and almost pushed it off the road, but Albert gritted his teeth and pressed on to the barren top of Bald Man’s Peak.
He parked. “Are you sure you should be doing this?” he asked his wife.
She loosened the lid on the mason jar. “Kenny is too young. I have to at least try.” And then she kicked open the door and rushed out into the rain.
Rose watched her mother stagger forward into the teeth of the storm, right into the centre of the clearing. She pulled the lid off and raised the jar high over her head.
That was when the lightning came.
With a blood-stopping crack the first bolt tore the sky in two and came down right in the jar. The entire plateau lit up, and Rose’s mother was suddenly burning bright as though she were made of light.
“Mama!” Rose cried and surged towards the door, but Albert held her back.
“It’s not ready yet!” he said. There was another crack of lightning, and another—
Afterwards Rose didn’t know whether she had been blinded by the light or by her tears.
“Mama!” she whimpered.
And then the van door was opening again, and her mother slid back into the car. She was soaking wet and smelled like a burning toaster, but other than that, she looked unharmed. Rose stared into the jar and saw hundreds of crackling veins of blue light flickering about.
“Get us home pronto,” Purdy said. “This is the final ingredient.”
Back at home, the kids were sent to bed, but Rose stayed awake in secret and watched her mother work.
Purdy stood over a metal mixing bowl filled with a smooth white batter. She carefully positioned the mason jar over the bowl and opened the lid. Little flickers of blue light poured out of the jar and zigzagged into the batter like snakes, turning the whole thing a glowing greenish colour.
Purdy turned the batter with a spoon and whispered, “Electro Correcto.” Then she poured it into a loaf pan and put it in the oven. She closed the door and, without glancing over her shoulder, said, “You should be in bed, Rosemary Bliss.”
Rose didn’t sleep very well that night. Her dreams were filled with lightning, with her mother glowing an electric orange and wagging a finger at her to go to bed.
In the morning, Purdy put the loaf on a plate, added a drizzle of white frosting from a pastry bag, and called to Albert, “Let’s go!” She crooked a finger at Rose. “You too.”
Then Rose, Purdy and Albert went to the hospital room where Kenny lay.
Rose didn’t think he looked so bad from the outside – a little quieter than normal, a little bluer than anyone should be – but there were grim-looking machines hooked up to him, and his pulse was a weak beeping in the tiny room.
Kenny’s mother looked up, saw Mrs Bliss, and burst into tears. “It’s too late for cakes, Purdy!” she said, but Rose’s mother just eased a crumb between his lips.
Nothing happened for the longest time.
And then there was the faintest gulp.
She slid a bigger chunk into his mouth. This time, his tongue moved and there was a louder gulp. Then she pushed a whole mouthful in, and his jaw seemed to work of its own accord. He chewed and swallowed, and before his eyes opened, said, “You got any milk?”
After that moment, Rose knew that the rumours were true: the baked goods from the Follow Your Bliss Bakery actually were magical. And her mother and father, despite living in a small town, owning a minivan and sometimes wearing bumbags, were kitchen magicians.
And Rose couldn’t help but ponder: Am I going to become a kitchen magician too?
TWO YEARS LATER, Rose had seen her fair share of catastrophes large and small in Calamity Falls – and had watched as her parents quietly mended them all.
When old Mr Rook began sleepwalking on to other people’s lawns, Purdy made him a batch of Stone Sleep Snickerdoodles, filling one of her giant bowls with flour, brown sugar, eggs, nutmeg and the yawn of a weasel, which Albert had painstakingly collected. Mr Rook never sleepwalked again.
When huge Mr Wadsworth got trapped at the bottom of a well and the fire department couldn’t manage to pull him out, Albert trapped the tail of a cloud in one of the blue mason jars, which Purdy then baked into Fluffy White Macaroons. “I hardly think this is a time for sweets, Mrs Bliss!” Mr Wadsworth cried when they lowered a box, “but they’re so delicious!” He devoured two dozen. Climbing out of the well was no problem after that – he practically floated.
And when Mrs Rizzle, the retired opera singer, found herself too hoarse to make it through the final dress rehearsal of Oklahoma! at the Calamity Falls Playhouse, Purdy made a Singing Gingersnap, which required that Rose go to the market for some ginger root, and that Albert go and collect the song of a nightingale – which had to be done at night.
In Germany.
Albert usually didn’t mind these daring adventures to collect magical ingredients – except for the time he had to collect the sting of a bee. He always brought home a little extra, and those ingredients were carefully labelled, stored in blue mason jars and hidden in the Follow Your Bliss kitchen where no one – except someone who knew where to look – would ever find them.
Rose was the one usually sent to collect the more mundane, less dangerous ingredients – eggs, flour, milk, nuts. The only emergencies Rose ever had to deal with were caused by her three-year-old little sister.
On the morning of 13 July, Rose woke to the clattering of metal bowls on the tiled floor of her family kitchen. It was the kind of violent, reverberating crash that would make the hair on an ordinary person’s neck stand at attention. Rose just rolled her eyes.
“Rose!” her mother shouted. “Can you come down to the kitchen?”
Rose heaved herself out of bed and stumbled down the wooden staircase, still in her undershirt and flannel shorts.
The kitchen of the Bliss home also happened to be the kitchen of the Follow Your Bliss Bakery, which Rose’s parents operated out of a sunny front room that faced a bustling street in Calamity Falls. Where most families had a couch and a television, the Blisses had a counter filled with pies, a cash register and a few booths and benches for customers.
Purdy Bliss was standing in the centre of the kitchen amid a wreck of spilled metal bowls, little mountains of flour, an overturned sack of sugar and the brilliant orange yolks of a dozen cracked eggs. White cake flour was still swirling in the air like smoke.
Rose’s little sister, Leigh Bliss, sat in the centre of the floor with her Polaroid camera round her neck and raw egg smeared on her cheek. She smiled gleefully as she snapped a photo of the wreckage.
“Parsley Bliss,” Purdy began. “You ran through this kitchen and knocked over all the ingredients for this morning’s poppy muffins. You know that people are waiting for our poppy muffins. And now they’re not going to get any.”
Leigh frowned for a moment, ashamed, then grinned widely and ran out of the room. She was still too young to feel bad about anything for longer than a minute.
Purdy threw her hands up in the air and laughed. “It’s a good thing she’s so cute.”
Rose looked with horror at the mess on the floor. “Can I help clean?”
“No, I’ll get your dad to do it. But,” Purdy ventured, handing Rose a list scrawled on the back of an envelope, “you could ride into town and pick up these ingredients.” She looked again at the wreckage on the floor. “It’s a bit of an emergency.”
“Sure, Mum,” Rose said, resigned to her fate as the family courier.
“Oh!” Purdy cried. “I almost forgot.” She removed the silver chain from her neck and handed it to Rose. The chain carried what Rose always assumed was a charm, but which, on closer inspection, revealed itself to be a silver key in the shape of a tiny whisk.
“Go to the locksmith and get a copy made of this key. We’re going to need it. This is very, very important, Rosemary.”
Rose examined the key. It was beautiful and delicate – like a spider touching all its toes together. She’d seen her mother wearing it like a charm round her neck, but always assumed it was just another one of her mother’s bizarre jewellery choices, like the butterfly brooch whose wings spanned fifteen centimetres or the hat-shaped hat pin.
“And when you’re done, you can go and buy yourself a Stetson’s doughnut. Even though I don’t know why you like them. They’re quite inferior.”
Rose, in fact, hated the taste of Stetson’s doughnuts. They were too dry and too cakey and tasted a little like cough syrup – what else could you expect from doughnuts served up at a place called Stetson’s Doughnut and Automotive Repair? But buying one meant getting to drop seventy-five cents into the outstretched hand of Devin Stetson.
Devin Stetson, who was twelve like her but seemed so much older, who sang tenor in the Calamity Falls Community Chorus, who had sandy blond hair that fell in his eyes, and who knew how to repair a torn fan belt.
Whenever he passed her in the halls at school, she found an excuse to stare at her shoes. In fact, the most she’d ever said to him in real life was “Thanks for the doughnut,” but in her brain they had already sped alongside the river on his moped, had made a picnic in the middle of an open field and read poetry out loud and let the long grass tickle their faces, had kissed under a street lamp in the autumn. Maybe today she would cross one of those off her list of things to do in real life with Devin Stetson. Or not. What would he want with a baker?
Rose turned to go and get dressed.
“Oh, and another thing!” Purdy cried again. “Take your little brother with you.”
Rose looked past the mess in the kitchen and through the side door into the yard, where her younger brother Sage Bliss was bouncing with gusto on their giant trampoline, shouting theatrically, still in his pyjamas.
Rose groaned. Carrying ingredients in the front basket of her bike was hard enough, but dragging Sage from door to door made the whole thing ten times harder.
1. Borzini’s Nuttery. 1 lb poppy seeds
Rose and Sage leaned their bikes against the stuccoed storefront of Borzini’s Nuttery and went inside. You really couldn’t miss Borzini’s Nuttery. It was the only store in Calamity Falls shaped like a peanut.
Sage marched immediately to a barrel of Mr Borzini’s fanciest imported Ethiopian macadamia nuts, shoved his arms into the barrel and tossed dozens of the nuts in the air. Rose stared at her brother as he scrambled like a nervous juggler to catch the macadamias in his mouth before they hit the floor.
At nine years old, Sage already looked like he belonged onstage at a comedy club. A mess of curly strawberry blond hair exploded from the top of his head, and two freckled, pudgy cheeks took up most of his face. His red eyebrows hovered over his eyes in a look of permanent confusion.
“Sage, why are you doing that?” said Rose.
“I saw Ty do it with popcorn, and he caught most of it in his mouth.”
Ty was their big brother, the eldest Bliss child, and he had one of those faces that made everyone melt. He had wavy red hair and wild grey eyes like a Siberian husky. He was fifteen and played every sport there was to play, and though he wasn’t always the tallest, he was always the handsomest. He was exactly the sort of boy who could toss a handful of popcorn in the air and catch all of it in his mouth. The only thing he couldn’t do was be bothered to help with the bakery. But their parents didn’t seem to mind much. Ty’s face was like a get-out-of-jail-free card that worked better and better with each passing year.
Mr Borzini, who himself was shaped like a peanut, lumbered out from the back storage room. “Hiya, Rosie!” he said with a grin. Then he saw the macadamia nuts on the floor and his grin disappeared. “Hello, Sage.”
“We need a pound of poppy seeds,” said Rose with a smile.
“Prrrronto!” Sage said, rolling the r like an Italian and kissing his fingers. Mr Borzini’s frown melted away and he laughed.
Mr Borzini smiled at Rose as he handed over the seeds. “You sure have got a funny brother, Rosie!”
Rose smiled back, wishing that someone thought she was as funny as Sage. She was quietly sarcastic, but that wasn’t the same thing. She wasn’t gorgeous, like Ty. She was too old to be adorable, like Leigh. She was good at baking, which mostly meant that she was meticulous and good at maths. But no one ever smiled at her and said, “Wow! How meticulous and good at maths you are, Rose!”
And so Rose had come to think of herself as merely ordinary, like a person walking silently in the background of a movie set. Oh well.
Rose thanked Mr Borzini and loaded the unwieldy Hessian sack into the metal basket on the front of her bike. Then she dragged her brother outside, and the two of them took off.
“I don’t understand why we have to go and get all this stuff,” Sage grumbled as they worked their way up a hill. “If Leigh spilled it, then she should have to go and get it.”
“Sage. She’s three.”
“I don’t understand why we have to work in the stupid bakery anyway. If our parents can’t run the bakery by themselves, then they shouldn’t have started one in the first place.”
“You know they have to bake – it’s in their blood,” Rose replied, taking a breath. “Plus, this town would collapse without them. Everyone needs our cakes and pies and muffins, just to keep going. We are running a public service.”
As much as she rolled her eyes, Rose secretly loved to help. She loved the way her mother sighed with relief whenever Rose returned with all the right ingredients, loved the way her father hugged her after she’d made a shortbread dough just crumbly enough, loved the way the townspeople hummed with happiness after taking the first warm, flaky bite of a chocolate croissant. And she loved how the mixture of ingredients – some normal, some not so normal – not only made people happy, but sometimes did much more than that.
“Well, I want a copy of the Calamity Falls child-labour codes because I’m pretty sure what they do to us is illegal.”
Rose slowed and clamped her nose as Sage rode past. “So is the way you smell.”
Sage gasped. “I do not smell!” he said, but then lifted his arms in the air to double-check. “OK, maybe a little bit!”
2. Florence the Florist. A dozen poppies
Rose and Sage found Florence the florist asleep in a comfy chair in a corner. Everyone speculated about her exact age, but the consensus in Calamity Falls was that she couldn’t be younger than ninety.
Her store looked more like a living room than a floral shop – yellow sunlight splashed through the shutters on to a little sofa, and a fat tabby cat lay splayed out near a dusty fireplace. A collection of vases near the window were filled with every conceivable kind of flower, and a dozen baskets hung from the ceiling with leafy green vines spilling out of them.
Rose brushed a curtain of ivy away from her face and cleared her throat.
Florence slowly opened her eyes. “Who is that?”
“It’s Rosemary Bliss,” Rose said.
“Oh, I see.” Florence grumbled as if she were annoyed at the prospect of having a customer. “What… can… I… get for you?” she asked, rising and panting as she shuffled towards the vases below the window.
“A dozen poppies, please,” Rose said.
Florence groaned as she bent to collect the papery red flowers. She perked up, though, as she looked over at Sage. “Is that you, Ty? You’re looking… shorter.”
Sage laughed, flattered to be mistaken for his older brother. “Oh no,” he said. “I’m Sage. Everyone says we look a lot alike.”
Florence grumbled for the second time. “I’ll sure miss seeing that heartthrob Ty around when he goes off to college.”
Everyone always wondered what her dashingly handsome brother would do when he was finally old enough to leave Calamity Falls. As much as he seemed destined to leave, Rose herself seemed destined to stay behind. She wondered whether, if she remained in Calamity Falls, she’d end up like Florence the florist – with nothing to do but sleep in a chair in the middle of the day, waiting for something strange and exciting to happen, knowing that it never would.
But leaving town would mean leaving the bakery. And then she would never get to know where her mother stored all those magical blue mason jars. She’d never learn how to mix a bit of northern wind into icing so that it would thaw the frozen heart of a loveless person. She’d never figure out how to fine-tune the reaction among frog’s eyes, molten magma and baking soda – which, her mother had told her, could mend broken bones almost immediately.
“And what about you, Rosemary?” Florence said as she wrapped the poppies in brown paper. “Anything exciting happening? Any boys?”
“I’m too busy babysitting Sage,” Rose said a little too forcefully.
It was true that she didn’t have any time to go on dates with boys, but even if she did, she probably wouldn’t anyway. A date seemed strange and a little unappealing, like sushi. She would like very much to stand with Devin Stetson at the top of Sparrow Hill and look down at the expanse of Calamity Falls, the autumn wind blowing through their hair, rustling the leaves. But that wasn’t a date.
Still, he was the reason she’d taken a shower before she left this morning, combed the knots out of her shoulder-length black hair, and put on her favourite pair of jeans and a blue shirt with just the right amount of lace (very little). She knew she wasn’t ugly, but she wasn’t stunning, either. Rose was sure that if there was any greatness in her at all, it lurked somewhere inside her and not on her face.
Her mother seemed to agree. “You’re not like other girls,” she’d once said. “You’re so good at maths!”
As Rose wondered why she couldn’t be both – the kind of girl who was good at maths and pretty – she and Sage left the shop, poppies in hand.
3. Poplar’s Open-air Market. 2 lbs pippin apples
A short burst of ferocious pedalling carried them over the train tracks to Poplar’s Open-air Market, which was so crowded in the early morning that the lanes between the rows of fruit and vegetable stands were like a parkway during a traffic jam.
“I need apples!” yelled Rose, waving one hand in the air.
“Aisle three!” a man yelled from behind a table stacked higher than his head with peaches.
Sage stopped the flow of traffic by picking up two giant butternut squashes and lifting them like dumb-bells.
“Why are you doing that?”
“I’m getting strong – like Ty,” he puffed, his face turning beetroot red. “Ty and I are going to be pro athletes. There’s no way I’m going to stay here and bake for the rest of my life.”
Rose grabbed the butternut squashes from Sage’s outstretched arms and put them back where they belonged. “But we help people,” Rose whispered to Sage. “We’re like good baker wizards.”
“If we’re wizards, then where are our wands and our owls and magic hats? And where is our arch-nemesis?” Sage said. “Face it, Sis – we’re just bakers. While you’re stuck here making cakes, me and Ty will be modelling sneakers in France.”
Sage pedalled off and Rose was left holding the apples, her arms trembling under the weight.
4. Mr Kline’s Key Shop. You know what to do.
In a rusty shack on the outskirts of town, Rose handed Mr Kline the delicate whisk-shaped key. He examined it through glasses as thick as English muffins.
The key shop was windowless, and everything in it was covered in a fine layer of grey dust, like Mr Kline had just come back from a very long vacation. Rose breathed in through her mouth. The air tasted like metal.
“This’ll take me at least an hour,” he said. “You’ll have to come back.”
Sage let out a ridiculously loud groan, but Rose was happy. Kline’s just happened to sit at the base of Sparrow Hill, and Stetson’s just happened to sit at the top.
“Hey, buddy,” she said. “Let’s walk up Sparrow Hill.”
“No way!” Sage said. “That hill is way too high and it’s way too hot. I’m gonna see if they have any new jelly bean flavours at Calamity Confections.”
“Come on,” said Rose, catching him by the shoulder. “It’ll be nice. We can stand on the fence at the lookout point and find our house. And I’ll buy you a doughnut.”
“Fine. But,” he said, raising one finger high above his head, “I get to pick the doughnut!”
5. Stetson’s Doughnuts and Automotive Repair
Rose was panting by the time they reached the top of the hill. Stetson’s was an unimpressive concrete hut adorned with the parts of old cars. Pansies grew out of tyres on the ground, and a DOUGHNUTS sign hung from an old fender fixed above the doorframe.
Rose trembled as she scooped her black hair, now goopy with sweat, away from her forehead. She was the kind of girl who was unafraid of spiders, dirt bikes, or burning her fingers in a hot oven – and she’d had plenty of encounters with each. But walking into the same room as a boy she liked? Now that was frightening.
Just as she gathered the courage to walk down the drive and enter the store, Devin Stetson breezed by on his moped, blond fringe flapping in the wind, and sped down the hill. Apparently his father had given him the morning off.
Rose’s stomach turned. It was the same sensation as when you fly higher than you should on a swing and you can feel your stomach a beat behind, flopping around inside you like a fish on the deck of a boat.
As she watched him go, she could swear he turned for a second and glanced back at her.
Sage had already ambled up to the lookout point and climbed to the second rail of the fence. “Whoa. Rose. Look.”
Rose shook herself and jogged over to see what Sage was talking about: a caravan of police cars was driving along the winding road that cut through town. Calamity Falls looked like a painting from the top of Sparrow Hill, and the cars looked like a blue and white knife slashing through it.
“Where are they going?” asked Sage, uncharacteristically quiet.
“Oh boy,” Rose said, squinting. “I think they’re going to the bakery.”
“MAYBE TY WAS arrested,” said Rose.
She and Sage threw their bikes down in the Bliss bakery backyard and ran towards the back door. Three police cruisers formed a fence outside the house, and a white Hummer with tinted windows squatted in the driveway like a fat pit bull.
Through the open driver’s-side window of the Hummer, Rose and Sage could see a man wearing a crisp police uniform and sunglasses. He was speaking into a walkie-talkie. “They’re still in there,” he was saying. “I know them – they won’t come out empty-handed.”
Rose stepped on a breeze block and peered through the open shutters of one of the kitchen windows. Her parents were standing on one side of the great wooden chopping block that Purdy rolled around like a shopping cart. A woman in a stern navy trouser suit stood on the other side. Purdy and Albert looked at each other nervously while Purdy kept a hand on the Bliss Cookery Booke, which sat closed on the chopping block. When the book was open, it looked like a fat white bird spreading its wings; closed, it looked vulnerable, like a little loaf of brown bread.
This is it,Rose thought. Someone has come for the book.
Every Tuesday evening, Albert and Purdy went to two-for-one night at the Calamity Falls Movie Theatre and left their neighbour Mrs Carlson in charge. As Albert left, he’d always say, “Don’t let anyone in! It might be the government coming to steal our recipes!”
The kids always laughed, but Rose knew that her father wasn’t really joking. She’d glimpsed pages in the book with medieval drawings of storms, fire, a wall of thorns, a man bleeding – recipes you wouldn’t want to fall into the hands of someone who might actually use them.
Sage climbed up on the breeze block, but couldn’t see through the window. “What’s going on?” he asked.
“They’re going to take the cookbook,” she said, struggling to push the words past a massive lump in her throat. She looked in at the strange cast-iron stove that sat like a dark beehive against one wall of the kitchen, at the row of glistening cherrywood cabinets that lined the other, at the tangle of racks and metal hooks that hung in a cluster from the centre of the ceiling and held at their ends every conceivable size of metal spatula and spoon, at the giant silver stand mixer that sat in the back corner, with a bowl so big that Leigh could (and sometimes did) climb inside, and a twirling dough hook the size of a rowing boat’s oar. She stared at everything her parents had built, shabby as it was, and stifled a sob.
She imagined her parents locked in a dirty jail cell, her brothers begging on the streets, the country ruled by a mob of tyrannical bakers who used muffins and pies as their weapons of mass destruction.
“I’ll stop them,” Sage muttered, and rushed around to the back door. He threw it open and shouted, “My parents didn’t do anything!”
Albert and Purdy spun round inside the kitchen and tried to shush Sage, but it was too late. The woman in the navy trouser suit stared out of the back door and motioned for Sage and Rose to come inside.
“My name is Janice ‘The Hammer’ Hammer,” she said. “I’m the mayor of Humbleton.” She flashed a strained smile, and Rose realised that though this wasn’t the friendliest woman she’d ever met, she wasn’t there to steal their book, either.
“Why are the police here?” said Rose.
“Those are cars that I had painted to look like police cars so that I’d look more intimidating whenever I went on a trip. The men inside are my colleagues on the Humbleton Board of Trustees. One is a florist, one is a lawyer and the third is a plumber who fills in when he doesn’t have any toilets to unclog.”
“Isn’t it illegal to dress up like a police officer?” Sage prodded.
Mayor Hammer just glared at him. “I came to ask your parents for help in fighting a summer flu in Humbleton. I’ve never seen one this bad – it’s like a plague. Rubbish bins overflowing with Kleenex. Doctors totally out of cough drops. The ear, nose and throat guy fleeing in terror to his condo in Florida. Wimp.”
Albert and Purdy laughed nervously.
“Anyway, I didn’t know what to do. But then I remembered your parents’ almond croissants – people swear they make fevers and runny noses just disappear. So I’ve come to beg for forty dozen.”
Mayor Hammer turned back to Albert and Purdy. “I know it’s short notice, but I’ve run out of options.”
Purdy wrung her hands. “We-we’d love to help,” she stammered, “but this kitchen really doesn’t have the capacity to make forty dozen croissants. We’re just a family bakery.”
“Come to Humbleton, then!” blurted out Mayor Hammer. “You could feed an army out of the kitchen at Town Hall. You’ll make your almond croissants there. And then you’ll make pumpkin cheesecake.”
“Pumpkin cheesecake?” asked Albert, his forehead wrinkling.
Mayor Hammer reached into her black leather briefcase and pulled out a yellowed newspaper clipping from the Calamity Falls Gazette. The headline read, “Ten-Year-Old Boy with Swine Flu Eats Bliss Pumpkin Cheesecake, Miraculously Cured.”
Albert wiped his hands on his apron. “Ha! Wouldn’t that be something? That was just a tall tale, though. The kid was just faking so he could skip school.”
Her parents never admitted to anyone but their children that Bliss baked goods had magic in them. “If word gets out about the magic,” Purdy always said, “then everyone will want it, and our little bakery won’t be our little bakery any more. It will become a giant factory. Everything would be ruined.”
If anyone noticed the sometimes miraculous effects of the cookies, the cakes, the pies, Albert and Purdy would shrug it off, insisting that these were the standard benefits of a perfect recipe, well prepared.
Rose, though, could still remember when that cheesecake had been made. She’d been watching from the stairs, observing how her parents had sifted the ingredients from a few different mason jars together one night after the bakery was closed, how a purple mist had risen from the bowl and swirled around her mother’s head, how the mixture had sizzled and popped, shooting off sparks of pink and green and canary yellow.
What she wouldn’t give to bake like that! It was a kind of baking that commanded respect, even if the whole thing was kept a secret.
Mayor Hammer tapped her foot impatiently. “I don’t care whether the cheesecake actually cures people or not – people love it, it makes them feel better, and that’s what we need.”
Purdy made her voice soft and sweet as a chocolate chip cookie. “Well… how long do you need us?”
“No more than a week,” said the mayor.
Albert shook his head. “I’m sorry, Mayor Hammer. We’ve been open for twenty-five years, and we’ve never closed the bakery for more than a single day. There’s just no way we can leave for an entire week.”
Mayor Hammer nodded to one of her bodyguards, who produced a leather-bound cheque book. She scribbled some numbers on a cheque and showed it to Albert and Purdy, who looked at each other in shock, like someone had just pulled a rabbit out of a hat – a very expensive, diamond-encrusted rabbit.
Albert gasped. “So many zeros.”
Purdy looked at Mayor Hammer with embarrassment. “We’ll do it—”
“Oh, wonderful!” said Mayor Hammer, handing Purdy the cheque.
Purdy tore the cheque into pieces. “You didn’t let me finish! We’ll do it, for free.”
Rose smiled. Her parents could be the richest people in the world – CEOs wearing fancy grey suits, sipping fancy champagne, riding in the back of a fancy car, like Mayor Hammer – but they would rather live in the simple rooms above the cramped kitchen of their tiny bakery.
Mayor Hammer reached across the chopping block and hugged Albert and Purdy to her chest. “We’ll take you on over as soon as you’re ready,” she said. “I’ll be waiting in the Hammer Hummer.”
Rose banged on the door to Ty and Sage’s room. A handwritten sign read VISITING HOURS: 3 P.M. TO 4 P.M.
“Ty!” Rose called. “Mum and Dad are going away! Please come downstairs.”
It was only eleven in the morning, and Ty rarely emerged from his cave before mid-afternoon. Rose cracked open the door. Ty had strung up a sheet to divide his and Sage’s sections of the room – Ty’s was behind the sheet, of course – but just past the edge of the sheet, Rose could make out a single white sock dangling off her older brother’s foot.
She pulled the sheet back and poked his broad, bare back. “Ty.”
Ty groaned. “You better have an amazing excuse for coming in here,” he said, “because you woke me up in the middle of a basketball dream.”
“Mum and Dad are leaving for a week. She is putting us in charge of the bakery!”
As soon as she said the words out loud, Rose imagined herself dancing around the kitchen in her mother’s blue-and-white-chequered apron, leafing through the Bliss Cookery Booke, sifting flour and melting chocolate and mixing in the tears of heartbroken young girls, or a vial of a good man’s last breath, or a pat of the chalky, bitter powder made from the ashes of summer campfires, or – who knew what she might use? Then she would turn the crank to raise the secret lightning rod that sometimes powered the main oven, and just like that, she’d be making magic. Rose sometimes grumbled when her parents asked her to help with the bakery, but only because the help never entailed any real magic.
The real magic, the blue-mason-jar magic, she imagined, would be worth all the trouble.
“Are you serious?” said Ty, bolting up. “This is great!”
“I know!” said Rose. “We’ll get to actually bake!”
Ty scoffed. “Correction, mi hermana.” Ty had taken to using Spanish whenever he could, in preparation for the day when he would finally become a pro skater in Barcelona. “You’ll get to actually bake. I’ll get to actually relax.”
Downstairs, Albert closed the shutters on all the kitchen windows, while Purdy lit a candle. Rose imagined that this was what it was like to be sworn into a secret society. She stood at attention, awaiting her parents’ instructions. Ty was slouched across the rolling chopping block, his chin in his hands, moaning with boredom.
“We don’t want to leave you,” said Purdy, “but our neighbours need us. We’ve asked Chip to come in full-time this week, but he can’t do all the baking and run the counter, so we need you two to pitch in more than usual.”
Rose shivered with excitement as Albert picked up the Bliss Cookery Booke.
“First things first,” he said, opening the stainless steel door of the walk-in refrigerator and carrying the book inside.
Rose and Ty followed their father through a narrow hallway lined floor to ceiling with cartons of ordinary milk, butter, eggs, chocolate chips, pecans and more. A dim fluorescent bulb flickered from above.
At the end of the hallway hung a faded green tapestry.
Rose had seen it before, when she would unload cartons of eggs after a trip to the poultry farm, and it had always captivated her. It was thick, like a Persian rug, and covered in delicately embroidered pictures: a man kneading dough; a woman stoking a fire in an oven; a child in a nightgown eating a little cake; an old man using a net to capture fireflies; a girl sifting a snowfall on to a frosting.
Purdy rested her hand on Rose’s shoulder. “Honey, do you have the key you copied this morning?”
Rose patted her breast pocket and removed the two silver keys – the tarnished one her mother had given her that morning and the shiny new one that Mr Kline had just made. She handed them to her father, who pocketed the old key, then pulled back the tapestry to reveal a short wooden door with faded planks and cast-iron bars, the kind of door made back when people were shorter. He pushed the delicate prongs of the shiny new whisk-shaped key inside the lock on the door, which looked like an eight-pointed star, and turned to the left.
The door creaked open. Albert yanked an old brass chain, and a dusty bulb came to life overhead.
Rose stood with her mouth agape.
Beyond the door was a tiny wood-panelled room the size of a short closet, crowded with medieval treasures. A painting of a thin, moustached man wearing a long robe the colour of an eggplant – on the frame was written HIERONYMUS BLISS, FIRST MAGICK BAKER in old English lettering that was almost impossible to read. An engraving of an aproned woman serving a piping hot pie to a king at a long banquet table: ARTEMISIA BLISS, WOMAN BAKER, HONOURED BY CHARLES II. A sepia-toned photograph of a man and woman holding hands outside a bakery, alongside a newspaper clipping from 1847: “Bliss Bakers Arrive on Lower East Side, Feed Immigrants.” The four of them stood, huddled in the storeroom, peering at the ancient artefacts by candlelight. “Your mother and I call this room the library, even though there’s only one book in it. The book is more important than all the books in all the libraries in this whole country, combined. So this is a library.”
Even Ty was impressed. “Bet you’re glad you became a Bliss, huh, Pop?”
Albert nodded. When he married Purdy, Albert had taken her name instead of the other way round. “Who wants to cling to a name like Albert Hogswaddle,” he’d said, “when you could become Albert Bliss?”
Albert sat the Bliss Cookery Booke on a dusty pedestal in the middle of the little storeroom, and they all huddled around, barely fitting inside the room. “The book stays here. No one opens it, no one moves it. Rose, I am giving you the key to this room.” He slid it on to a string, knotted it, and handed it over. Rose wondered briefly how her mother had known they’d need an extra key. But then she shrugged it away: Her mother just knew things. It was part of her magic.
Rose took the key from his outstretched palm and hung it round her neck. She burned with excitement.
“But you are not to open this door unless there is a fire,” Albert said, the ever-present smile suddenly gone from his face. “In which case you should try to save the book. I repeat: Do not open this door. There will be NO magic.”
All the excitement flew out of Rose, and she deflated like a popped balloon. No magic? Why?
“Tick tock, people!” shouted Mayor Hammer from inside the Hummer. “The flu is spreading even as we speak!”
Albert huffed and puffed in the background as he hauled six leather suitcases from the house to the driveway and loaded them into the Hummer. One was filled with clothes, the other five loaded down with jars of Madagascar cinnamon and dried fairy wings, with special black sugars from a forest in Croatia and trapped doctors’ whispers, with dozens of things mundane and mysterious.
Purdy gathered Rose and her siblings together in one big clump in the driveway. “Rose and Ty, you’ll help Chip in the kitchen.”
Ty groaned. “Why do I have to help? That’s Rose’s territory.”
Purdy patted Ty sympathetically on his beautiful, tawny cheek. “I know you can do it, Thyme.” She went on, looking at Sage. “Sage, you’ll stay with your sister Rose. I mean, help her.”
“Of course! I will be very helpful,” Sage said, winking devilishly at Rose and everyone else.
Rose rolled her eyes. Sage’s idea of helping usually involved whining and trying to burp the alphabet.
Albert finished loading the suitcases. “Mrs Carlson will be coming this afternoon and staying all week to watch Leigh. Be nice to her and do as she says.”
“But she yells in her Scottish accent and it hurts my ears!” said Sage. “And she falls asleep all the time while she’s tanning or watching TV. And she smells weird.”
“That’s not being nice, pal,” said Albert, getting in and buckling his seatbelt. “But… you’re not wrong. Rose, just keep an extra eye on Leigh, in case Mrs Carlson falls asleep.”
Purdy smiled wide, even though two fat tears were rolling down her cheeks. “We love you all!” she said.
“Wait!” Leigh screamed. “Picture!”
Purdy laughed. “All right. Mayor Hammer, would you mind taking a family picture?”
Mayor Hammer sighed loudly in a way that meant that she minded very much, but still, she grabbed the Polaroid camera from Leigh’s outstretched hands, pointed it in the direction of the Bliss clan, and clicked the shutter.
Then Purdy and Albert hopped into the back seat and shut the door behind them. The Hummer lumbered down the street, three fake police cars filing after it.
Rose turned to Ty. She wanted to say something like, “I’m happy we’re going to be spending some time together this week.” But Ty was already strolling down the driveway towards the street.
“My vacation officially starts –” he said, pushing a button on his watch – “now!”So much for Ty spending time in the bakery. Rose sighed. Her brothers never paid any attention to her, not even now.
Sage had already resumed jumping on the trampoline.
Leigh tugged on Rose’s shirt. “Rosie Posie! An emergency!” she shrieked.
“What, Leigh?”
“A slug! I stepped on a slug!” Leigh lifted her sneaker to reveal a gooey corpse.
Rose undid the Velcro straps on Leigh’s shoes, which used to be white, but were now the colour of a puddle, and wiped the sole on the grass until the dead slug came loose.
Leigh stared at the creature with her big black eyes. Everyone always said that Leigh looked like a miniature version of Rose – black hair, black fringe, black eyes, tiny nose – only cuter. There was something about the roundness of her little face that Rose’s lacked, and not just because she was older.
“Should we have a funeral for him?” Leigh asked.
“The slug?” Rose asked.
Leigh nodded solemnly and thrust the Polaroid picture into Rose’s hand: Purdy and Albert smiled widely, their arms wrapped round handsome Ty, hysterical Sage, adorable Leigh. Rose stood off to the side, but you wouldn’t know it was Rose because only her shoulder had made it into the photo.
Rose shoved the picture back at Leigh and began another week of the same old thankless routine.
TO ROSE, THE prospect of helping Chip was far more terrifying than finding a slug.
Chip, who had been Purdy’s kitchen helper since before Rose could remember, was already at the bakery, staring through the kitchen window, past the slug and past the swing and past the hedges, past Calamity Falls. He was bald and tanned and looked like he had just walked off a photo shoot for the cover of a bodybuilding magazine.
The one conversation Rose had ever had with Chip involved the silver metal ID tags he wore on a chain round his neck.
“Were you in the army, Chip?” she’d asked.
“The marines,” he’d grunted.
“Then why are you working as a helper in a bakery?” she’d asked.
He squatted down so that his face was square with hers. He breathed noisily, staring her in the eye. “I like to bake,” he’d whispered.
Rose pictured what the week ahead would be like – having to bake alongside the hulking bulk of Chip’s chiselled torso, and having to use the recipes in the boring old Betty Crocker cookbook, which Albert and Purdy had given to Chip before they left.
“Here, Chip – use these recipes.”
He’d snorted. “What about your special cookbook?”
“This one is easier to read,” Purdy had said, handing him the paperback book with an ordinary cherry pie on the cover.
She was terribly upset that her parents weren’t allowing them to use the magical Cookery Booke while they were away.
It wasn’t fair. She had devoted her life to the bakery!
It was Rose who woke up early to help her parents prepare for the day while other kids her age were still sleeping. It was Rose who came home straight after school because she was needed to help clean the bakery in the afternoons. And Rose did it all without complaining in the hope that one day she too would become a kitchen magician. And now her parents were denying her the only thing she’d ever wanted: to bake something magical.
And it was Rose who got stuck helping her little sister when no one else wanted the job. Rose looked down at Leigh, who was digging a hole with her hands in which to bury the fallen slug.
“I’m not in the mood for a funeral,” said Rose. “I’ll push you on the swing. Come on.”
Leigh left the slug and bounded over to the swing, a wooden contraption that Albert had erected a year earlier. The wood was wet and green with mould, and the rusty chains creaked as Rose heaved her little sister back and forth.
“Push!” Leigh pumped at the air as hard as she could by swinging her knobby knees. “Higher, Rosie, higher!”
Leigh was wearing her filthy red-and-white-striped shirt and red-and-white-striped headband, the same ones she insisted on wearing every day. When they were absolutely covered with mud stains and juice spills and marker mishaps, Rose stole them from Leigh’s room while she was asleep and popped them in the wash.
Haven’t I earned the right to try a little magic? thought Rose. When is all of this errand running and babysitting going to get me anywhere?
A minute later, Rose heard the faint buzzing of a motorcycle. The sound drew closer and closer to the house. Rose’s heart thumped in her chest like an angry bullfrog trapped in a shoebox. She only knew one person in town who rode a motorcycle (or moped, anyway), and his name was Devin Stetson.
Her mind raced to throw together a few things to say if he were to stop in her driveway and stroll into the back garden.
Hi. How are you? My name is Rose. Have we met? Why are you in my back garden?
He would say that he saw that caravan of police cars and was worried about her. Then he would say that he needed to get to Poplar’s Open-air Market because his father wanted to start making blueberry doughnuts, but he didn’t know where it was.
I know where it is, she’d say. Let me show you.
Then she’d climb on to the back of his moped, and her knees would brush against his dark denim jeans. She would rest her chin on his shoulder for the entire ride and feel the sting of his blond hair whipping her cheeks in the wind. Even if they hit a rock and she was tossed into a ditch and broke both legs, it would be worth it.
But Rose wasn’t like other girls her age. Rose had responsibilities.
The frantic whirring of the motorcycle slowed a bit as it pulled into the driveway. But this was not Devin Stetson’s rusty red moped – this was a gleaming black beast with a head shaped like a bull, with a silver saddle and sharp silver horns for handlebars. A figure sheathed entirely in black leather hopped off the saddle and leaned against the body of the motorcycle.
Rose’s heart raced. There had already been too many ominous people in her driveway that day.
She turned to see if Chip was still watching from the kitchen window – Chip would be able to tackle this person, whoever it was, if it came to that – but he was nowhere to be found.
Rose stepped in front of Leigh to guard her.
The figure removed its black helmet with gloved hands coated in silver spikes.
The rider was a young woman – the tallest, most sensational-looking woman Rose had ever seen outside of a movie screen. She had strong black eyebrows, a long Roman nose and short black hair cropped close to her scalp in a chic pixie cut. Her full lips were painted red, and her big white teeth glinted in the sun. She was the kind of woman who looked like she belonged in the pages of a magazine – the kind of woman Rose secretly wished she would grow up to become.
“Ahhhhh!!!” the woman exclaimed. “Fresh air! A small town! I love a small town!” She tossed a throaty laugh to the sky, then undid the metal clasps on her black leather jacket and tossed it on to the bike. She was wearing a lacy blue shirt underneath, much like the one Rose was wearing.
“You must be Rosemary!” she said, sauntering towards the swing. She indicated her shirt. “Look at us! We’re twins!”
When the woman in the black leather got close enough, Leigh bolted into the kitchen, leaving Rose clutching the rusty metal chains of the swing.
“Don’t look so frightened, pet! I’m your aunt Lily!”
This woman, whoever she was, was smiling from ear to ear with all of her gleaming fancy white teeth. Could Rose really be related to someone so… beautiful? She looked more like a fashion model than an aunt.
Rose conjured up a mental image of the Bliss family tree she’d made for an assignment on genealogy back in the third grade – it was a short, very wide piece of white poster board on which she’d drawn her and her siblings’ names: Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, Thyme; and above that, her parents’ names: Albert Hogswaddle, Purdy Bliss. Her aunts and uncles on her father’s side were Aunt Alice, Aunt Janine and weird Uncle Lewis. On her mother’s side: no one. There was no Lily. The name did ring a bell, but Rose couldn’t remember why.
“Is your mother here?” she asked. “Oh, I hope I came at a good time! I miss old Purdy Bliss!”
Rose spoke cautiously. “My mother never told me she had a younger sister.”
Lily laughed again, her long neck arched back. “She doesn’t!”
Rose must have looked confused. “I’m not your aunt, per se,” Lily said. “Your mother’s great-great-great-grandfather Filbert Bliss had a brother named Albatross, and that was my great-great-great-grandfather, so I believe that makes us… fifth cousins once removed! But Aunt Lily has such a nice ring to it, don’t you think?”
Rose pictured the family tree in her mind’s eye, trying to remember if there were any Albatrosses or Filberts, but the tree morphed into a twisted, overgrown thicket.
“Anyway, I heard my dear Purdy had a baby! And started a bakery!”
“Four babies,” said Rose, shielding her eyes from the sun with her hand.
“Well! Seems I’m a little late!”
Lily sauntered back to the motorcycle and began removing her gloves, finger by finger. “You see, I am a baker as well! I’ve published a cookbook – well, I published it myself. But it’s the same difference! I even had my own radio show for a few months – Lily’s Ladle! Surely you heard about it!”
Rose had never heard of a radio show called Lily’s Ladle, but she suddenly remembered where she’d heard the name Lily. It was several years ago. One night after dinner, Rose was helping her father clear the dishes while Purdy took a phone call. It was the kind of phone call where her mother didn’t do much talking, but just leaned against the kitchen counter, speechless, wrapping the cord round her finger, then unwrapping.
When she hung up, Rose and Albert stared at her, waiting.
“It was Lily,” she said. Albert’s eyes went wide. “She found us. She wants to come for a visit.”
Albert winced. “You said no, right?”
“Of course,” said Purdy.
“Who is Lily?” asked Rose.
“No one,” said Purdy, heading upstairs.
Rose snapped out of her memory, then walked up to Lily and tapped her on the shoulder. “Come to think of it, I have heard of you. My mother talked to you on the phone a while back. She didn’t want you to come for a visit,” Rose said, her heart beating thunderously. “Why didn’t she want you to come for a visit?”
Lily raised her eyebrows. “A long time ago, my great-great-great-grandfather Albatross had a terrible fight with your great-great-great-grandfather Filbert, and now Purdy won’t speak to me, and it’s such a shame. So I’ve come here to mend old fences!”
“You mean… old bridges?” said Rose.
“Exactly!” Lily smiled. “Look, darling, I know you don’t believe me, but I am your cousin! Or your aunt! Same difference! I have the family mark to prove it!”
Lily turned round and pulled down one side of the back of her blue shirt, revealing her shoulder blade, which was as elegant as an angel’s wing. Rose squinted and saw a strange birthmark, a blob with a long handle of dark trailing off it, the end hooked.
Rose had one just like it on the side of her leg. Leigh had one on her neck. Purdy had one on her arm. Ty and Sage both had one on their stomachs. They all had one.
“See, darling?”
Sage ran out from the kitchen to investigate the black bull that had landed in the driveway. He saw the mark on Lily’s back and shouted, “You’ve got the ladle!”
Lily spun round and tried to hoist Sage’s hefty torso up in her arms, then thought better of it and set him down. “You must be Sage!”
Sage giggled and squirmed. “Who are you?”
Lily pressed a finger to his nose and rubbed it back and forth. “I’m your aunt Lily!” she said, and curtseyed with a flourish. “And I’ve come to rejoin my family!”
“My mother isn’t here,” Rose said, fidgeting with the hem of her shirt.
Aunt Lily walked over to her motorcycle and unhooked a small tweed suitcase and a smaller bag in the shape of a log, made of crushed crimson velvet that changed colour depending on the way you looked at it.
“Looks like I arrived at just the right time, Rose!” said Lily. “What better way to show your parents I want to heal our troubled relationship than to help their children out when they’re away?”
Rose thought that the whole thing sounded fishy, at best. She prayed that her parents would suddenly waltz back into the driveway and announce that they’d forgotten their underwear.
But there was no waltzing.
“Maybe you should come back when my parents are here.”
Lily made a face like a wounded dog. “I just thought I could help. With the bakery.” She picked up her suitcase and bag and gingerly hooked them on to the back of her motorcycle. “But I can see that you’d like me to go.”
“Noooooooo!” Sage yelled. “Rose, what are you doing? You can’t send a family member away! I mean, she has the ladle!”
Rose looked at the glamorous professional baker who was offering to help her for a week. Then she looked at Sage, her only sous-chef, who chose that moment to pick at his nose. There would be too much work that week for her and Chip to do by themselves, and she had a feeling that Ty and Sage and Leigh were not going to step up to the plate. Besides, there was something about this woman that made Rose unable to look away from her – even if she was fishy, at best.
“Wait!” Rose called to Lily. “I guess… we really could use the help.”
“Wheeeee!” cried Lily. “I know exactly what we’ll make for dinner tonight!”
What we’ll make for dinner tonight.
Rose couldn’t help but happily notice Aunt Lily had said we.
Mrs Carlson shuffled into the back garden later that afternoon. She had her short blond hair in curlers and wore a sequinned top and white leggings that were too tight. In one hand she carried a portable TV, and in the other hand she carried a box of porridge and a thing in a clear plastic bag that looked like a stomach, and smelled like worse.
Sage pinched the end of his nose. “What is that?”
“I’m going to make haggis,” Mrs Carlson said in her thick Scottish brogue. “Haggis is porridge boiled in the stomach of a sheep. It’ll put hair on your chest.”
Sage clutched at his chest.
“That’s very kind of you, Mrs Carlson, but it won’t be necessary,” Rose said nervously.
Mrs Carlson tilted her head sideways to look at Rose. “Why?”
“Well,” Rose began, “our aunt has come for a visit, and she’s already started making dinner.”
Mrs Carlson grunted. “Your father didn’t say anything about an aunt!”
Rose looked around nervously. “He… forgot she was coming. But she’s here now. And she’ll do all the cooking this week.”
Mrs Carlson shuffled over to the metal rubbish bin by the back door and dumped the sheep’s stomach inside. “Good. I didn’t really want haggis anyway.”
Since the entire first floor of the Bliss house was the bakery, the family spent most of their time in the evening crammed round the table in the kitchen. It wasn’t so much a table as a booth, like one you’d find at a diner – two high-backed benches of dark wood with red leather cushions facing each other, separated by a varnished cherrywood table and a medieval-looking cast-iron chandelier above. The family ate breakfast, lunch and dinner in the booth, and often gathered after dinner to resume a never-ending game of crazy eights, trying their best not to elbow one another as they picked cards up and slammed others down.
The boys banged the end of their forks and knives on top of the table and shouted, “Li-ly! Li-ly!” as they waited for dinner. Leigh perched on top of the table like a frog, her knobby knees flanking her ears. Mrs Carlson sat squished between Ty and Sage, clutching her leather purse to her chest. “A family of animals!” Mrs Carlson exclaimed.
Rose shrugged, feeling invisible compared to her louder-than-life siblings.
Aunt Lily had been puttering around in the background of the kitchen for the last hour. She had changed out of her black leather motorcycle outfit and into a flowing white cotton dress, which made her look impossibly tall and clean and elegant, even as she worked in the hot, cramped kitchen. After a while, she set a giant orange serving platter in the centre of the table.
“Paella valenciana!” she shouted. “This is a rice dish from Spain. I learned to make it while I was studying classical guitar outside Barcelona.”
It was a pile of fragrant rice stained the delicate orange colour of saffron, with pieces of chicken, spicy red sausage and a slew of edible sea creatures.
“This looks delicioso, Tía Lily!” Ty exclaimed, even though he normally refused to eat anything but buttered noodles and liquorice. Tonight he was wearing a crisp button-down and had spiked his hair with gel. Rose guessed it had something to do with the gorgeous woman puttering around the kitchen.
“I just think seafood is so much fun!” Lily said. “My father used to bring mussels and shrimps and clams home all the time. He was a fisherman.”
“So your side of the family aren’t bakers?” Rose asked, thinking that maybe the birthmark on Lily’s shoulder might actually be a fishhook instead of a ladle.
“They tried to be,” Lily began, “but they didn’t have the right… stuff. So they all moved to Nova Scotia and became fishermen instead. But I didn’t want that kind of life. So I bought a motorcycle and ran away to New York City to be a glamorous actress!”
“I went there once,” croaked Mrs Carlson through a big gulp of orange rice. “Someone stole my purse, and then a pigeon dropped a you-know-what on my head.”
The Bliss kids burst into laughter.
“Sounds like New York City to me!” said Lily, fanning herself. “When I arrived, I soared down Broadway on Trixie – that’s my motorcycle – and I felt so desperately, magnificently alive! Then I realised I had nowhere to live, and only enough money for a few hot dogs! So I bought myself a few hot dogs, and I ate them in Central Park.”
“That’s exactly what I would have done, Tía Lily,” said Ty in his deepest voice. Rose had never seen her brother try so hard to be friendly. And now he was calling this strange woman Tía Lily like he’d known her all his life.
“Yes!” Lily cried. “Sometimes one must have a hot dog! In any case, I was wandering west on Seventieth Street, and it was getting dark. I looked over and I saw a little cupcake shop with white shutters and adorable yellow curtains, and a sign in the window saying they needed an assistant. So I marched right in there and I said, ‘I will assist you for free if you will let me sleep in the kitchen.’ And they did! And that is where I learned to bake.”
“Can you take me with you when you go back?” said Sage.
Leigh stood up and began bouncing up and down on the table. “New York City! New York City!”
“Maybe I will take you to New York one day,” Lily said, placing a hand softly on Leigh’s back to still her while Mrs Carlson just sat there grimacing. “But I won’t be going back for a while. I’m going to host my own TV show, you see. It will be called 30-Minute Magic. So I am travelling around looking for the best recipes in the country, recipes that are wonderful enough to share with the world.”
“Rose!” Sage exclaimed. “Let’s show her the book!”
Rose stiffened. “What book?” If Lily was hoping to learn magical recipes, she had come to the wrong place. “Oh, you mean the books! The accounting books. Sage thinks you might be interested in our business model.”
Lily smiled and shrugged. “Oh, that’s OK! I’m a cook, not a mathematician!”
Rose glared at her little brother, who just stuck out his tongue in return.
The next morning, Rose arrived downstairs to find Ty mopping the front room of the bakery, wearing crisp black slacks and a black shirt and vest. He looked like a waiter.
“You’re up!” Rose exclaimed. “And you’re – what’s wrong with you?”
Ty looked around nervously. “Nothing. I’m cleaning up.”
“Since when do you even know how to use a mop?”
“I’m just trying to help the new lady of the house,” he said.
Rose wondered if she should have tried harder to look slick that morning. Unlike most of the girls at school, who wore brand-name jeans and fancy jackets with rhinestones on them and expensive-looking tops in bright colours, Rose never much cared about what she wore. For one thing, anything on her body eventually got dirty – with butter or grease or flour or whatever other ingredients were lurking in the Bliss kitchen. And anyway, a new blouse wouldn’t make her look like a movie star. It wouldn’t make Devin Stetson notice her. It would just make her look like she was trying too hard.
But standing next to Aunt Lily, with all her fabulous clothes, Rose felt like a dirty street urchin and wondered if she shouldn’t run out to a store and buy herself something bedazzled.
Rose pushed through the saloon doors that separated the front room from the kitchen and found Chip standing in the corner of the kitchen, beating egg whites in the stand mixer. “The marines!” said Lily, fanning her fingertips in front of her mouth. She was standing at the counter kneading some dough, and had exchanged her black leather for a red sundress with white polka dots. “You know, I was a pastry chef on a cruise ship for a year!”
Chip looked up from the mixer and strode towards Rose. “Morning, Rosie!”
Lily touched his shoulder. “Chip, darling, Rose and I need some girl time. Go and have a cup of coffee and relax!”
Chip sighed deeply and happily, then skipped out.
Rose stood with her mouth agape. What exactly had this Aunt Lily done to smooth the gruff crankiness of Chip? Why was her older brother cleaning? There was something electric about Aunt Lily, something that made you want to dress your best and wear a smile, but Rose couldn’t put her finger on it.
“Help me with these?” Lily asked, removing the bowl of whipped egg whites from the stand mixer and offering Rose a spoon.
The two of them plopped heaped spoonfuls of egg white on to a lined baking sheet. Lily worked quickly but effortlessly, like a twirling ballerina. Her face was a picture of easy concentration: lips pressed together, brow slightly furrowed.
“So, Rose. What is it you’d like to do with your life?” asked Lily.
Rose stared at the ceiling. No one had ever asked her that before. Sometimes all she wanted to do was bake, and sometimes she thought she’d scream if she ever saw a muffin again. Sometimes all she wanted to do was run away from Calamity Falls, and sometimes she thought that if she ever left, her heart would shrivel into a black nut inside her and stop beating altogether.
“I’m not sure,” she answered finally.
Lily set the tray of meringues in the oven. “I want to go everywhere and meet everyone in the world. I just don’t see how a person can do the same thing day after day, go to the same places, see the same people. I would just die.”
Rose bristled. Aunt Lily had just summed up her entire existence.
“Well, there’s something comforting about doing the same things and seeing the same people,” Rose said, peering over the saloon doors into the front room. Ty was just changing the front sign from CLOSED to open, and there was already a line round the block. “See those people? I know all of them.”
“Tell me about them,” said Lily gently.
“OK, see the man in the frog sweatshirt, standing at the counter? The first one in line?” Lily nodded. “That’s Mr Bastable, the cabinetmaker.” Mr Bastable had stringy white hair and a black moustache, and had always looked to Rose like a cousin of Albert Einstein. He wore a sweatshirt with a dozen frogs printed on the front. “He gets a carrot-bran muffin every morning.”
Lily peered out of the door. “What about the little woman behind him with the pointy hair?” The woman was so short, Rose knew, that Lily could only see her hair, which was a greyish tower that came to two peaks on either side of her head, like the ears of a wolf.
“That’s Miss Thistle, my biology teacher. And she is in love with Mr Bastable. And I think he is in love with her too. But they never speak.”
Lily gasped. “A secret love! How do you know?”
“One day, Mr Bastable came to our biology class to show us a slideshow of his frogs, and Miss Thistle stared at him the whole time with this very peaceful smile on her face, and he kept looking away from her, but you could tell it was because he didn’t want her to see how he felt.” Rose was well acquainted with this technique – she used it every time Devin Stetson walked past her in the hallways.
Lily looked at Rose with a shiny wetness in her eyes. “I have a secret.” She leaned forward. “I’m not really from Nova Scotia. My father was in the army. We moved to a different place every year. I’m not really from anywhere. So I don’t understand what it’s like to live in one town your entire life.” Lily shook her head and squeezed her eyes closed. When she opened them again, her bright smile had returned. “It just seems so boring! Like everyone here is stuck in their ways and can never change.”
Rose stiffened. “Are you talking about my mother too?”
Lily put her arm round Rose. “I don’t mean it in a bad way,” she said. “It’s just… your mother made a choice. She had gifts. She could have been famous. But instead she ended up here.” Lily smiled widely. “You have gifts too, Rose. I can see it. It’s just a matter of what you choose to do with them.”
Rose blushed. No one had ever called her gifted before. No one had ever called her anything but Rose.
She was beginning to understand the bizarre spell that had fallen on Ty and Chip. There was a grandeur and a magnificence about this woman that rivalled even unicorns. Either that, or Aunt Lily just always knew the right thing to say.
Ty called back from the kitchen. “Tía Lily! More croissants!”
Lily picked up the Betty Crocker cookbook with the ordinary cherry pie on the cover. “Is this your usual recipe book? I’d have thought your mum would have been cooking from something more… special.”
“Nope, this is it,” Rose said nervously. “Ordinary recipes. My mum just adds love.”
Time flew smoothly by with Lily at the helm: Leigh bounded through the kitchen as usual, but instead of tripping over her and spilling all the ingredients, as Purdy had, Lily gracefully danced around Leigh and even got her to sit and concentrate: “I need you to count out groups of ten raisins, Leigh, into each muffin tin. Can you do it?”
Leigh nodded her head and sat on the floor, slowly and deliberately plopping raisin by raisin into the muffin tins until she couldn’t think any more, then curled up in a ball and fell asleep by the refrigerator.
Ty smiled at all the ladies from town at the front counter, who oohed and aahed at how handsome he was in his shirt and vest. Chip ferried back and forth between the kitchen and the front room like a waiter at a five-star restaurant, standing as tall as he could and nesting one hand in the small of his back as the other held trays of cookies and cakes high above his head. He looked so mournful when five o’clock rolled around and his shift ended that Lily invited him to stay for dinner.
At dinnertime, Mrs Carlson was dismayed to find the family sitting Indian-style on a quilt in the backyard, Chip and Lily carving a leg of lamb the size of an air conditioner.
“So. What strange thing will we eat for dinner tonight? Curry?” she spat.
“No, ma’am!” Sage cooed. “This is a leg of lamb with that zeekee!”
“Tzatziki,” Lily corrected, laughing. “It’s a Greek yogurt sauce.”
Leigh sat on Chip’s lap and gnawed on the same piece of lamb for a long time, Sage and Ty wiped the juicy yogurt sauce from their mouths with their sleeves, and Mrs Carlson could barely contain a smile as she sucked down pieces of lamb, which were tender as butter. All the while, Rose stared in disbelief at her aunt, who in less than two days had transformed the knitted brows of the Bliss clan into easy smiles.
Leigh lifted the Polaroid camera that was permanently strapped to her neck and snapped a picture of Aunt Lily.
After everyone had finished their lamb, Lily sneaked off into the kitchen and reappeared carrying a shallow tart with a pale crumb crust, filled with yellow custard. “I made you all something wonderful for dessert!”
Rose’s face fell. She hated lemon tarts.
So did Sage. “Ech! Lemon!” he winced, puckering his mouth like a fish.
“No, no!” Lily cried. “There’s no lemon! I absolutely detest lemon tarts! No, I guarantee that this is unlike anything you’ve tried before!” she said, doling out slivers with a long knife. “This is a recipe from my great-great-great-grandfather Albatross.”
Rose looked at the slice on her plate. Only the top layer was yellow custard – beneath it were layers of swirling crimson and blue and even something that shimmered like the skin of a fish. When she bit into it, she tasted thick, buttery goop that was sweet and a little salty and, indeed, unlike anything she’d ever had.
The Bliss bunch sat in silence, nibbling on tiny bites of the sublime tart, trying to make it last all night.
“See, this is the sort of special recipe I’ve been travelling around trying to collect,” Lily explained. “Truly unique recipes.”
The phone rang from inside the kitchen, but everyone was too engrossed in the tart to notice – even Mrs Carlson, who sat quietly nibbling, a look of rapture on her face.
Only Leigh, who lost interest in the tart after one nibble, ran into the kitchen and stood on one of the red leather cushions in the booth to answer the old black rotary phone. She called from inside, “Mama is on the phone. Ty, talk to Mama!” She left the receiver dangling from the wall in the kitchen and ran outside to rejoin the group on the picnic blanket.
Ty grumbled and stood up.
Lily grabbed his wrist. “Finish that last bite, Ty – I don’t want any to go to waste!”
Ty grinned at the look of Aunt Lily’s long, elegant fingers wrapped round his wrist, and, like an obedient dog, popped the remaining chunk of the tart in his mouth and swallowed in one gulp, then paced to the back door, as if in a trance. He found the phone swinging on the cord and listlessly pressed it to his ear.
Rose could hear him speak in the way he always spoke on the phone – mechanical, almost robotic. “Hi… Good… No, nothing new has happened.”
Which wasn’t true at all! Aunt Lily had arrived, which was possibly the newest thing that had ever happened in the entire dull history of Calamity Falls.
Rose had the urge to run to the phone and tell her parents all about Aunt Lily, to make sure that she’d done the right thing by letting her into the family business. She told herself she was going to do so, right after this next bite of tart. And then the next bite. And, really, right after she finished cleaning her plate. She just couldn’t stop nibbling on the tart. Not even after Ty hung up and sat down in the backyard again, saying, “Oh, it was just the usual – clean up and go to bed early and blah blah blah.”
Aunt Lily silenced him by raising a forkful of tart towards his mouth. And then they all quieted and ate in silence until every plate and utensil was licked clean and every crumb of the tart was gone, as if it had never been there in the first place.
Every night before bed, the four Bliss children gathered upstairs in the little bathroom with the green floral wallpaper for a sacred ritual they called Brush Time. The foursome huddled round the tiny white porcelain sink in their flannel pyjamas and brushed their teeth together.
Ty stumbled around the bathroom in his one pair of blue lacrosse shorts, shirtless, listlessly dragging the bristles over his tongue. Leigh sort of smeared her mouth with toothpaste and then spat. Only Rose brushed her teeth as they were supposed to do: from the gumline to the tips, twice round, inside and out.
Sage sat on the little rocking chair next to the claw-foot tub with his arms folded across his chest, pouting.
“What’s wrong now, Sage?” grumbled Rose as she helped Leigh wipe toothpaste from her lips, nose and face. But she already knew. He, like the rest of them, was thinking about their “aunt” Lily, who even now was settling into the guest room in the basement.
“Why can’t we show Lily the book? She needs recipes for her show! Then when she gets famous, we can visit her and be famous too!”
Ty spat into the sink with gusto. “I’m with Little Bro on this one. She needs our help. I think she would love… us if we gave it to her.”
Lily’s words rang in Rose’s brain: You have gifts too, Rose… It’s just a matter of what you choose to do with them. She looked down at the whisk-shaped key that hung round her neck. “We can’t do it. I promised.”
“Fine!” shouted Sage. “So just ’cause you’re afraid of Mum and Dad and have to do everything they say, Aunt Lily suffers? Good, kind, wonderful Aunt Lily? Who made us paella and helped out in the bakery all day and made us a special dessert that was better than anything Mum and Dad ever made from that stupid cookbook?”
“But we don’t even know her!” Rose cried. Why was her desire to do the correct and responsible thing always met with frowns from her brothers?
Then Rose thought of something – what if she could help Lily and herself in one fell swoop? What if, instead of showing Lily the book, Rose could copy some of the recipes and practise them right under Lily’s nose? Then, if they still trusted Aunt Lily at the end of the week, they could show her the recipes. That way Rose herself would get to learn a little magic and maybe show her brothers that she wasn’t all rules and business. Then maybe she’d tell her mother about it, years later, over a cup of tea, and her mother would laugh and say, Oh, Rose, what a take-charge kind of person you are! I think you and I should run the bakery together.
Rose beamed at the thought. “I guess it would be all right,” she began, “to just copy a few of the recipes out of the book and learn them ourselves; then we can teach them to her at the end of the week. That way she’ll just think it’s a regular recipe with a few weird ingredients. But she can’t know about the book!”
Sage and Ty nodded, smiling. “Lily’s gonna love this,” Ty said.
“OK,” Rose said, putting her toothbrush away, and then Leigh’s. “Let’s meet in the back of the fridge tomorrow morning before she wakes up and copy some recipes.”
The brothers Bliss gave each other a high five, then patted Rose on the back. And for the first time in a while, she felt like they had all come from the same parents.
“For the record, I have a bad feeling about this,” Rose said, but Ty and Sage were too busy doing a victory dance to hear. She picked Leigh up in her arms like a baby and plopped her on to her bed. Rose pulled the soft red jersey sheets up to her little sister’s chin and tucked them under. “Do you think I’m making a mistake, Leigh?”
But Leigh was already asleep.
VERY EARLY THE next morning, Rose tiptoed down the stairs and into the kitchen, still in her nightgown. She had a tiny bad feeling about this whole plan, but a huge thrilled feeling about using the cookbook and being part of a team with her brothers, so that won out.
The sky outside was a pale grey, and little rivers of rain inched their way down the windows, blurring the lines of the backyard. Rose could barely make out the dark form of Aunt Lily’s motorcycle sitting in the driveway. Leigh was still asleep in her bed, and as Rose crept down the stairs, she had been able to hear Mrs Carlson snoring mightily. All was quiet from the basement, so it seemed that Lily was asleep as well.
Ty was crammed into the booth, still wearing his blue lacrosse shorts, a white tank top and a lime-green walkie-talkie headset that he’d got for his birthday a few years before.
“Welcome, Rosemary,” he said, motioning for her to sit. “You’re right on schedule.” He pressed a button on the headset and spoke into the microphone. “Coriander, come in. Come in, Coriander.”
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