Bliss

  She promptly stopped talking. She also promptly stopped looking Rose in the eye. She just stared past Rose.

  “Leigh? You okay?” Rose said.

  Leigh nodded, still staring into the distance, then crawled slowly into the kitchen and up the stairs to her bedroom.

  “Where is she going?” Sage asked.

  Rose followed her upstairs and watched as Leigh crawled into her bed, turned on her glowing ladybug night-light, and pulled the covers under her chin. She lay there, silent, and closed her eyes.

  “Are you okay?” Rose asked again. “Leigh?”

  But Leigh was already snoring. It was very much unlike Leigh to go to bed in the middle of the day, without any supper. But then again, she had just eaten a whole slice of cake.

  In the hallway, Rose passed Mrs. Carlson, who announced, “Since the young one is napping, I’m going to take a nap as well. There’s been too much action for the day, and my blood pressure can’t take it. The muscleman and the supermodel ought to be back soon, anyway. They can take care of that mess downstairs,” she said. “You are a strange family. You know that, don’t you?”

  Rose nodded, and Mrs. Carlson said no more, just lumbered slowly away.

  Outside in the backyard, Ty and Sage were stacking the plates of cake in the little red wagon that Albert kept in the garage. Rose remembered when her father used to cart her and Ty around town on errands. Now Ty was using it to cart around magical cake that their parents would surely disapprove of.

  “I don’t know about this,” Rose said. “Leigh is acting weird. She went to sleep.”

  “Good,” Ty said. “That oughtta keep her out of our hair.”

  “But isn’t that a bit weird?” A dull ache had settled in Rose’s gut, and that usually meant that she needed to stop whatever she was doing and reevaluate it. The cake had made the girls walk away like robots, and Leigh just fell right to sleep. Was that healthy? It didn’t look like the other recipes in the book, and it contained black oily tears from a warlock. Was this really the right solution? She wished she could call her parents and ask. But, of course, she couldn’t.

  “We didn’t do all this baking for nothing,” Ty huffed. “I am personally making sure that everyone in town eats a piece of this stupid cake.” Ty folded his arms over his chest. “Rose, we have to fix the town before Mom and Dad get back.”

  “Oh … you’re right,” Rose said optimistically. She didn’t want Ty to think that she was weak. “It’ll definitely work.”

  Ty pulled a map of Calamity Falls out of his pocket and walked away, pulling the cart with one hand. “This should take, oh … seventeen hours,” he said grumpily, and he pulled the wagon out the driveway and down the street, leaving Rose and Sage standing alone in the backyard. They stepped back into the kitchen and exhaled.

  Now there was just the matter of the mess.

  Not only had they failed to clean the front room of the bakery after the librarians’ brawl, but they also had dirtied the kitchen beyond repair. Forty-four filthy cake pans were stacked in teetering piles in the kitchen sink; dried gobs of gray-pink dough clung to the sides of the mixing vat and also to the wall and cabinet doors; and Rose had no idea what the clear puddles on the floor were—water, egg white, sweat, or warlock’s eye preservative liquid.

  Not to mention the mess Rose and Sage found when they wandered outside: Dozens of little dirty paper plates and plastic forks littered the sidewalk. The seething horde of girls had trampled all of the flowers and shrubs outside the house, and there was a gaping hole in the middle of the beloved trampoline where one girl had jumped too high and fallen straight through.

  When they opened the door to go back into the kitchen, Chip and Aunt Lily were back from their lunch at Pierre Guillaume’s, looking, indeed, like a supermodel and a muscleman.

  “I thought you said you were going to clean up!” Chip shouted. He stormed angrily upstairs to fetch cleaning supplies. “Honestly, Rose! What were you thinking?”

  Lily cornered Rose and Sage by the walk-in refrigerator. She batted her eyelashes in a way that was both attractive and terrifying. “Would either of you mind very much telling me just what is going on?”

  Before Rose could think of a suitable lie, Sage blurted out, “It’s all because of the cookbook!”

  CHAPTER 12

  Lying to Aunt Lily

  “Cooooook-booooook?” Lily asked, drawing out the word to three times its usual length.

  “Yes, um, the Betty Crocker cookbook!” Rose could barely breathe—she felt like the air was sticky maple syrup running down her nose and filling her lungs. “See, we made all this wonderful cake, and everyone came to have a piece, and that’s why the yard is all trampled and there are all those plates on the lawn.”

  Lily knelt down, took off her beret, and shook her hair out—not that there was much hair to shake out. Rose noticed that Lily had a way of kneeling down whenever she wanted to say something important, so that her eyes were directly across from Rose’s instead of three feet higher.

  “What kind of cake did you make?” Lily asked, squinting in a way that let Rose know that Aunt Lily knew she was lying.

  “Strawberry,” said Rose without a moment’s hesitation.

  “Tell her what we really made!” Sage shouted.

  Then Rose did something she wasn’t proud of: She opened the walk-in refrigerator and shoved Sage inside.

  She leaned up against the shut door to keep him from escaping, even as he screamed for mercy. It was a good thing she’d worn rubber-soled sneakers that morning, because she was able to hold the door shut just by bending her knees and wedging her sneakers against the floor.

  Now his shouts were muffled. Rose knew that he was screaming about the cookbook, but he could just as easily have been screaming about wanting a Nintendo Wii.

  “Regular old strawberry cake, eh?” said Lily, arching her perfect eyebrows. “Did Sage help?”

  “Mmm-hmm!” Rose said, nodding. The fridge jolted against her back; Sage had begun throwing his entire body against the door.

  “Rose,” said Lily. “It’s obvious that you’re hiding something. You literally just locked your brother in the refrigerator. Why don’t you just tell me what’s really going on? It can’t be that bad. Besides, I did tons of bad things when I was young. Once, I glued my father’s shoes to the floor!” Lily let out a chuckle. “Can you believe that? Shoes! Glue! I mean, what was I thinking?”

  At that moment, Rose was knocked to her knees as Sage burst triumphantly from the fridge. “I got a running start!” he crowed. “I’m strong!”

  “There’s no denying that,” said Aunt Lily.

  Then Sage remembered why he’d been pushed into the fridge in the first place. “Rose is lying!” he shouted, throwing his arms around Aunt Lily’s long neck. “We made a cake from the real cookbook!”

  “What cookbook?” Lily asked.

  “We have a magical family cookbook,” Sage said. “Our parents told us not to touch it, but we convinced Rose to let us.”

  Rose wiped off her knees and stood. She wanted badly to run to the phone and dial her mother and say, “Mama, we broke out the cookbook and almost wrecked the town and now Sage is telling our pretty, fake aunt about it”—but her tongue had gone all heavy and limp, like a wet sock, and she couldn’t get it to move, much less form words.

  Rose found this just the least bit strange, so she did a mini experiment. She forgot about Aunt Lily as she tried to remember how to count to ten in Latin. “Unus. Duo. Tres,” she muttered. “Quattuor. Cinque. Quinque?” Was it with a C or a Q? Was C the Italian version? Rose’s tongue had regained full function.

  I want to tell Mom about Aunt Lily, Rose thought, and tried to say something out loud.

  Her tongue went limp again.

  So Rose wasn’t imagining it—her tongue failed to function every time she thought about telling her mother about Aunt Lily. Certainly it was no accident—but there was no time to think about it now, because Sage was still fo
lded in Lily’s long arms, spilling bean after bean, like a broken sack of lentils being dragged along the sidewalk.

  “I see,” said Lily. “And where is this magical cookbook?”

  “Behind the tapestry at the end of the walk-in fridge,” Sage said, proudly patting his belly.

  “Innnterrressstingg!” Lily cooed, drawing the word out into the length of an entire sentence. Lily turned to Rose and beckoned to her. Her face was filled with so much love, so much compassion, that Rose found herself inching over without even thinking about it. Lily held out her luxurious, soft hand with its long, polished fingers, and Rose slid her own grubby hand into it.

  “Rose,” said Lily. “I know you were lying to protect your parents. But if this cookbook got you into some trouble, it’s important that you tell an adult about it,” Lily said. “An adult in your family, one with a ladle on her back.”

  Rose steeled herself. She had handled the horde of screaming girls, and she could handle Aunt Lily. “We took care of it.”

  “How?”

  “With cake.” And that was it. Rose didn’t need this mysterious stranger’s help.

  Lily smiled widely. “Fair enough, darling.” Then the smile disappeared. “But I think you should give me the key to the storeroom—just in case any more nonadults should be tempted to break out the book and get into even more trouble.”

  The uncomfortable ache in Rose’s stomach turned to full-on spasms at the thought of giving Lily the key. “I can’t give you the key,” said Rose. “Mom and Dad left it to me. But I promise that no one will touch the book again this week.”

  “Now, Rose,” said Lily, showing all her teeth again in a way that should have been reassuring but wasn’t, “isn’t that what you promised your parents originally? And didn’t you break out the cookbook anyway?”

  The words stung. It was true. Perhaps Rose wasn’t fit to be a magical baker. Or even a good daughter. Or even much of a girl. Rose tasted a single salty tear run into the corner of her mouth.

  Sage lifted one finger high into the air and exclaimed, “I will hold the key!”

  “What?” Rose groaned, twisting her blue dress with her fingers. “No way, Sage. You are by far the least responsible person in this family.”

  Now it was Sage’s turn to cry. “No one ever lets me do anything!” he screamed.

  Lily brushed Rose’s bangs away from her eyes and whispered, “Rose. I think you should let him hold the key. He wants to be taken seriously. If you don’t start trusting him now, he’s going to get the message that he’s just a joke. And then he’ll never take responsibility for anything.”

  Rose looked over at Sage, who could improvise a Shakespearean monologue better than anyone she knew, who could make anyone laugh, just by looking at them, and who loved Ty to distraction, if not quite Rose herself. Then she remembered how frustrated she felt when her parents didn’t allow her any responsibility in the bakery, how insignificant. She didn’t want to be the one to make Sage feel the same way. He was her brother, and he deserved a chance.

  Rose went over to Sage, who’d begun maniacally jumping up and down and shouting. She tried to touch his shoulder to calm him, but he only jumped away.

  “Okay, okay!” Rose shouted. “You can hold the key!”

  Sage immediately stopped jumping and turned to her, panting, his tongue hanging slightly out of his mouth. He wore a look of suspicion. “Why?” he said, testing her.

  “Because… I want you to be an actor one day,” she said.

  Sage crinkled up his nose like he smelled a dead rat. “You want me to be an actor?”

  “Yes. Or a politician. Or something where you get to talk a lot. So I am letting you take responsibility by holding the key for a few days. But you are not to let anybody else touch it. And I mean ANYBODY,” Rose said, cocking her head to indicate Aunt Lily, who was standing by the saloon doors with her hands delicately cupping her cheeks, looking very pleased.

  Rose gently pulled the string around her neck up over her hair and placed it over Sage’s puffy red head, like she was knighting him.

  For the first time in ages, Sage wrapped his arms around Rose and hugged her. He hugged her so tightly that she had to pry him off just so she could breathe, but still—it made her smile.

  Rose spent the rest of the afternoon washing cake pans in the kitchen while Lily and Chip cleaned up the front room, and Sage and a half-asleep Mrs. Carlson picked up the paper plates and plastic forks that dotted every inch of the ground within a hundred-yard radius.

  Ty came home at around ten p.m. His collared shirt was soaking wet, his face was smeared with dirt and dust, and his hands were covered in blisters from pulling the wagon.

  Rose poured him a glass of water. “Did you do it?” she asked.

  Ty’s eyes were already closed, and he drank down the full glass. He could only nod.

  “Everyone in town ate a slice of cake?” she asked.

  Ty nodded again. “So many people…,” he mumbled.

  “Listen,” Rose said. “I have to tell you what happened. Sage spilled the beans to Aunt Lily about the cookbook, and she wanted the key to the door, but I gave it to Sage instead because it just didn’t seem right to give her the key.”

  Ty stumbled toward the stairs, Rose following. “Are you listening, Ty?” she asked. But he just staggered up into the dark of the second story.

  When they reached Sage and Ty’s room and creaked the door open, they saw a tall, shadowy figure sitting on Sage’s bed.

  It was Aunt Lily. Sage was asleep, and Lily was sitting near his shoulders, patting his hair.

  “What are you doing up here?” Rose whispered.

  Lily jumped up and spun around. She exhaled loudly. “You frightened me!” she whispered, catching her breath. “I was just … saying good night to Sage.” Then she slipped between Rose and Ty and sauntered downstairs.

  Rose breathed a sigh of relief when she saw the little silver whisk lying on Sage’s chest, glinting in the moonlight, right where it was supposed to be.

  Ty sank into his bed. Rose turned to leave, but then he reached up and grabbed her hand. “Hey, Rosita,” he said. “That was actually kind of fun today.”

  Rose smiled wide.

  “Minus the singing and the hours of toting cake around in a red wagon in the middle of July.” He yawned. “Still, like, well done.”

  Rose wanted to say so much to him, and had Ty not been falling asleep, she might have. Something like, Thank you so much for saying that because it means a lot to me today that we worked so well together because sometimes it can seem like you don’t care about me at all because you’re too busy being handsome and popular and I’m just your flour-covered kid sister who bugs you all the time but I love you more than I know how to say so I’m just glad you think I’m good at something.

  But all she said was “Good night, Ty.”

  And then she closed her brothers’ door and went to the bathroom to wash the considerable grime from her face.

  Then the portable phone rang and Rose answered, shutting the bathroom door behind her. It was her mother.

  “I hope it’s not too late, honey, but we just got back to our hotel!” said Purdy. “I had to check in on my kiddles! Did everything go smoothly today?”

  Rose answered with a resounding “Yes!” because it had gone smoothly, in its own way. Sure, the town had been thrown into chaos, but she had fixed it, with her brothers’ help. Rose felt guilty for not telling her mother the whole truth, but knew that someday she would take her mother out to tea and recount every detail, and Purdy would squeeze Rose to her chest and say, That’s my little baker!

  “Also,” said Rose, “it might be too early to call it, but I think that me and Ty and Sage might be friends now.”

  Purdy laughed. “That’s wonderful, sweetheart. What happened?”

  Rose puzzled a minute. Was it that Ty and Sage both just wanted to learn magic in order to get closer to Aunt Lily? Or were they starting to like their sister? She s
upposed it didn’t really matter.

  “I guess it’s just that baking is really bringing us together.”

  “Well, that’s what makes baking so magical, Rose.”

  Rose smirked to herself. That, and all the stuff you keep in the secret pantry.

  “Good night, sweetheart.”

  “Good night, Mama.”

  Outside, the sky had grown dark and the first star had appeared. It glowed bigger and brighter and a little bit pinker than a star. Maybe it’s a planet, Rose thought. Maybe it’s Mars. Mars was Rose’s favorite planet. It was named after the Roman god of war, and Rose felt like a warrior that day. Rose reached over her shoulder, patted herself on the back, and collapsed into sleep.

  CHAPTER 13

  Ni Esrever

  Rose woke up the next morning feeling hot and itchy and confused.

  More bizarre and frightening things had happened to her yesterday than happen to a typical person during her whole lifetime. She was looking forward to going downstairs and having just a plain old regular day.

  Her only tasks until her parents returned were to see that the bakery ran smoothly and to make sure no one tinkered with the book. That way, when they came back, they would see that the kitchen was clean, Leigh’s hair was washed, Ty and Sage had all of their limbs, and Rose was worthy of being entrusted with the family secrets.

  Rose threw on her favorite T-shirt, one with pink and orange stripes, and splashed some water on her face. Her skin was peppered with inflamed red pimples. This happened a lot in the summer, when Rose was harried from working at the bakery and sweating constantly in the process.

  There was a knock on the bathroom door. “Just a minute!” Rose called out. She leaned forward into the mirror, studying her zits. She needed some of Lily’s magic potion.

  As though summoned, the voice called out, “It’s your aunt Lily! May I come in?”

  Before Rose could say no, that she was fine by herself, Aunt Lily opened the door and sauntered inside.