Bliss

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.