Kathryn Littlewood

Bliss


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      “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.