Bliss

  That’s when former U.S. president Jimmy Carter walked into the Bliss bakery. He looked older than he had in Rose’s textbooks, but that made sense, because he had been president a long time ago. A few thin clumps of white hair cascaded over either side of his head and stopped just above the collar of his denim cowboy shirt.

  “Jimmy’s dear sister was my college roommate.” She winked at Rose. “And that’s a truth.”

  Ty’s jaw dropped as he handed the box of snickerdoodles to Jimmy Carter. “The United States of America thanks you for your service,” the former president said, smiling.

  Mrs. Havegood chuckled as she took his arm. “Have a lovely day, Rose! You too, Thyme!”

  Ty winced. It was the ultimate burn.

  That is, until Ashley Knob walked in. She was wearing a dress that a normal person might wear to a movie premiere. It was green and short and far too revealing to be appropriate for a high-school girl. She pranced up to the counter and said, “I’d like a scooped-out blueberry muffin, please.”

  Rose furrowed her eyebrows. “Scooped out?”

  “Yeah. It’s where you scoop most of the flesh of the muffin out. Otherwise the muffin has too many carbs.”

  Rose thought that that really defeated the purpose of eating a muffin in the first place, but she snapped on a pair of surgical gloves and dove right in.

  Ty should have been helping other customers, but instead he leaned over the counter and whispered in dulcet tones, “Hey, do you remember two days ago, when we kissed? Through the glass?”

  Ashley pretended not to hear him.

  “You kissed me!” he repeated, louder and more forcefully. “We kissed.”

  “Um, I don’t kiss people who work in bakeries,” she said, her nose so high in the air that the top of her head was practically brushing her back.

  “But you said you loved me,” Ty said, smiling devilishly.

  “I’m, like, horrified right now and don’t know what you’re talking about. I mean, you’re pretty hot and stuff, so, maybe if you worked at a hedge fund or you were a lawyer or something I would have kissed you, but here you are scooping out muffins, so, like, no.”

  “But don’t you remember the crowd of girls and you clawed your way to the front just to try to kiss me, and—”

  “Let it go, Ty,” said Rose.

  Ashley Knob grabbed her scooped-out muffin and huffed out, the hard platinum ringlets of her long hair whipping Ty in the cheek.

  “She totally kissed me through the glass,” he whispered. “I wasn’t hallucinating that, right?”

  “No, but she was.”

  Ty paced around behind the counter. “I don’t even like her—I just want her to know that she was going crazy over me. I need to find a picture of us kissing. Do we have any security cameras outside?” Ty threw off his apron, and Rose knew that he was done helping at the bakery for the day.

  Ty was back to his old tricks.

  Rose craned her neck over the saloon doors and saw Sage and Leigh bouncing up on the lawn where the trampoline had been, while Mrs. Carlson sunned herself in a lawn chair. Rose pursed her lips. She was still the only one really dedicated to the bakery. Nothing had changed. Maybe Aunt Lily was right. Maybe they really were just fine.

  The day passed without anything too bizarre happening.

  Rose’s mind would have been completely at ease had Mr. Bastable budged from the bench, but he hadn’t. He was still sitting there, in the blazing July heat, still in his sweater, his blazer folded beside him, and he still hadn’t touched the muffins.

  Rose was peering out at Mr. Bastable and worrying mightily when Devin Stetson walked in.

  His hair was gelled into an insouciant ramp that curved off the base of his forehead. His lips were pink and a little chapped. His milky skin was tanned.

  Devin had never been to the bakery before. Why now? Why today, after she’d had literally thirty minutes of sleep and two days’ worth of grease and dirt caked in her bangs? Why couldn’t he have really seen her last night, when he so feebly attempted to kiss her cheek by backing his scalp into her face?

  Devin lingered by the front door as his mother and father, both clad in Hawaiian print shirts and visors and sunglasses, perused the glass counter.

  “Do you have any Danishes?” asked Mrs. Stetson. Her eyes were buggy and bright. “Or is it just Danish? The plural of Danish, is it Danish, or Danishi? You know, is it like sheep, where the plural is sheep? Do you know what I mean?” Rose stopped staring at Devin long enough to realize that Mrs. Stetson was talking to her.

  “I never thought about it. People usually just ask for one Danish.”

  Mr. Stetson laughed as he went to look at the cakes.

  Devin stayed by the door and looked at the floor and at the ceiling and everywhere but at Rose’s face. Obviously he had no recollection of the night before. Not that it had been real anyway.

  He caught her looking at him, and made a face and nodded toward his parents, as if to say, “Sorry about them, they’re really embarrassing.”

  Rose nodded back to him, as if to say, “Mine are the same way.”

  Devin gradually drifted up to the counter and eventually found himself right across from Rose. Rose’s face was burning and her mouth was dry.

  “You always buy donuts from us, right?”

  “I wouldn’t say always, but sometimes, yes,” she said.

  “I’m Devin. Hi.”

  “I’m Rose. Hi,” she squeaked. Her hands began to tremble, and she hid them behind her back. Devin Stetson was talking to her! Without the aid of an Upside-Down Cake!

  Rose smiled to herself while she packed up the Danish. Danishes? Pastries. She packed up the pastries.

  “Thank you, dear!” yelled Mr. and Mrs. Stetson as they bustled out in their Hawaiian shirts.

  Devin nodded in her direction. “See you around—like a donut,” he said.

  And Rose gave him a military salute, which she realized one second later was the single least attractive thing she could have done.

  Rose was hating herself when she caught the reflection of Devin’s face in the glass, wincing at his own lame pun.

  Even though he didn’t remember dancing with her, Rose had managed to jump the biggest hurdle of all: telling him her name. She smiled wider than she thought possible.

  That is, until Miss Thistle approached the bakery, and Rose realized what had been keeping Mr. Bastable glued to that godforsaken bench all day. He’d been waiting for her.

  Felidia Thistle was hurrying up to the front door in a breezy summer cotton dress, when she was stopped by the froglike squeak of Mr. Bastable.

  “Wait!” he coughed. He tried again a moment later, clearer this time. “Wait. Miss Thistle.”

  Rose watched through the glass as Miss Thistle spun around, shocked. Apparently, she didn’t remember any of the week’s events, because she was smiling at Mr. Bastable, who looked truly handsome, despite the formidable sweat stains in his armpits.

  “Miss Thistle, those wing nuts in the bakery gave me two carrot-bran muffins by mistake. Would you mind eating the other one? If I have too much starch, it activates my irritable bowel syndrome.”

  Rose winced. It could have been a lovely moment, save for the mention of irritable bowel syndrome.

  But Miss Thistle didn’t seem to mind. She sat down on the bench next to Mr. Bastable, and they slowly nibbled on their carrot-bran muffins, smiling at each other the entire time. Rose couldn’t hear what they were saying—probably they were talking about science—but it was a start. She didn’t even mind that Mr. Bastable had called her a wing nut.

  There was a magic in the two of them sitting there as the brilliant orange of the setting sun glimmered through the trees, but it had nothing to do with spells or mason jars. It was the magic of a person’s ability to change, to grow, to heal, without the aid of any magic at all.

  At the end of the day, after Chip had gone home and Mrs. Carlson had gone to bed, Rose sat in the booth in the kitchen and dra
nk a glass of water, while looking out the backdoor window at her brothers. They were taking turns pushing Leigh on the swing set with such abandon that they nearly sent her flying over the top bar. It was nice to watch, but Rose still felt a little left out.

  Aunt Lily sidled up to the kitchen table in an old-fashioned silk dressing gown covered in bright orange lilies.

  “Rose, we need to talk. I have a proposition. You know what I think of you and your potential. I think you should come to New York with me.”

  Rose blushed and laughed out loud. The thought of going to New York was so grand and so overwhelming that it sounded like a joke. “What for?”

  “I want you to work on my TV show. At first you’ll stay behind the scenes, helping me prepare recipes and figuring out how to teach them to a TV audience. But after a while I hope you’ll join me on camera! I’ll do your makeup, and we can be stars together! You have such gifts, gifts that far exceed operating a small business. We’re a lot alike, you and I, and I want you to dream big. You’re sensational, never forget that.”

  Rose imagined herself baking alongside Aunt Lily in the kitchen of a vast, gorgeous, city bakery, or on the soundstage of a TV studio in front of a live audience of laughing and doting fans. Oh, the love she would feel! The warmth, the acceptance, and the respect!

  The thing in the basement had been right all along. Rose did desire beauty and importance, but she didn’t want to drink them from a bottle labeled TINCTURE OF VENUS—she wanted to earn them. Maybe she would earn them on Lily’s coattails, just like it had said.

  Rose had to purse her lips together to contain her embarrassingly long smile. “But where would the recipes come from?”

  “Well, that’s the only little snag. We’d need the Bliss Cookery Booke. I’ve gathered a few magical recipes from the Bliss canon in my travels, but only enough for a few episodes.”

  “So you want to … steal the cookbook?”

  Aunt Lily chuckled nervously. “No, of course not, dear. I’d only borrow it!”

  “But won’t my parents notice it’s gone? How would they do their own baking?” And then she thought of something else she was almost afraid to ask. “Wouldn’t they miss me?”

  Aunt Lily pointed her finger and wiggled Rose’s nose back and forth. “That, my darling, is the simple part. When I was young, I learned a recipe for a wonderful little treat called a Forget-Me Biscuit. You just whisper the name of the thing you’d like the eaters to forget—in our case, that would be you and me and the Bliss Cookery Booke—and you mix the whisper into the biscuit dough. Then we’d feed the biscuits to Ty, Sage, Leigh, Chip, Mrs. Carlson, and your mother and father, and then they’d forget that you or I or the book ever existed. They won’t miss you a wink! They’ll go on running a lovely bakery with their other lovely children—it just won’t be magical. Meanwhile, you and I will become blisteringly, mind-blowingly famous and respected and adored!”

  Rose couldn’t believe she was even entertaining this notion, but there she was, entertaining it. “Do the biscuits really work?” she found herself asking.

  “Oh, I know they work. I’ve used them before,” Lily said, grinning. “How do you think I escaped my own humdrum family? I was destined for greatness, and they were only holding me back. So I whipped up a batch of biscuits, and they never got in my way again!”

  Rose glanced outside again at her brothers as they pushed her sister back and forth in the swing. How could she leave them? Would their lives be the same without her?

  On the other hand, how could she stay and let things go back to the way they had been? Rose couldn’t take another day of being sent out like an errand girl to buy fruit while her parents did all the magic and her siblings all had better things to do. Not after this week. She’d seen the book in all its glory, and she wasn’t about to give it up now. Still, the whole thing seemed a little drastic.

  “I don’t know if I can,” said Rose.

  “Well, it’s just a matter of whether you’d like to stay here for the rest of your life and squander your gifts, or whether you want to really make something of yourself, to win the respect of millions and grow up to be a glamorous woman of the world. Like moi.”

  A glamorous woman of the world. Respected by millions. Those were all that Rose ever wanted to be. But at what price?

  “When would we leave?” Rose coughed. “If I were going.”

  Aunt Lily yawned nonchalantly. “Tomorrow morning. I will be up late preparing the dough for the Forget-Me Biscuits. If you’d like to go, join me in the kitchen late tonight and we’ll make magic—”

  Just as Aunt Lily was finishing up her instructions, Ty and Sage carried Leigh into the kitchen and settled into the booth with Lily and Rose.

  Sage stood next to the table and made a proclamation. “I say we order pizza for dinner!” He bowed with one hand in front of him, as if he were wearing a cape. “This is our last night before Mom and Dad come back, and there will be no more fun food after that. And no more magic.”

  “Right. No more magic,” Rose said. So it was true. Even Sage thought it. They would never be allowed to touch the cookbook again, even if they didn’t mention all the trouble it had caused. Rose’s parents just didn’t trust her.

  After Leigh fell asleep that night, Rose quietly packed her clothes and her alarm clock into the little yellow duffel bag she sometimes brought to sleepovers. Then Rose tiptoed through the hallway and downstairs into the kitchen, where Aunt Lily was standing over the kitchen counter, an empty blue mason jar in her hand.

  “Lily,” her aunt whispered into the jar. The whisper glowed a faint purple as it swirled into the jar. Inside, the glowing air congealed into a faint ghostly image of Lily’s smiling face.

  Thankfully, Aunt Lily hadn’t seen her. Rose continued watching.

  “The Bliss Cookery Booke,” Lily whispered. And the new whisper floated into the jar and formed an image of the familiar brown leather cover of the Cookery Booke.

  And then, “Rosemary.” When Aunt Lily whispered her name, Rose’s arms instantly broke out into cold, clammy goose bumps.

  Rose watched as Lily’s whisper formed a glowing image of Rose’s whole body inside the jar. She couldn’t say for sure, but it looked from her perch on the steps like her image was banging on the glass walls of the jar, screaming to be let out.

  Aunt Lily screwed the top on the mason jar and shook it, then opened it over a metal mixing bowl in which she’d prepared a crumbly, buttery dough. The whispers whipped out of the jar and into the bowl. The ball of dough rose out of the bowl and shattered into a thousand little pieces that hung suspended in the hot, dark air of the kitchen.

  The crumbles of dough swirled around, slowly at first, then faster, like leaves in an eddy, until all the minuscule pieces swirled back into the bowl like they were going down a drain.

  Aunt Lily patted the dough with her hands. “All right! That’s done.”

  That’s when she looked up and noticed Rose standing on the stairs.

  Aunt Lily smiled widely. They both knew what this meant.

  “I’m coming to New York,” Rose whispered.

  CHAPTER 17

  Homecoming

  Before the crack of dawn the next morning, Aunt Lily went to Rose’s room and shook her awake. “Let’s go, my darling! The biscuits are baking downstairs.”

  Rose slipped on a pair of jeans and a blue T-shirt that she’d laid out for the trip. Then, once Aunt Lily had disappeared downstairs, Rose slipped into the bathroom to brush her teeth one final time.

  Rose was surprised to see Ty and Sage and Leigh inside, having a brush party. Ty looked annoyingly handsome as ever in his navy basketball shorts. Sage’s hair was a wild curly mess. Leigh stared up at Rose with dark, trusting eyes that seemed to take up the entire upper half of her face. It had been easier to imagine being away from them the night before, when they weren’t right in front of her, looking so earnest.

  “What are you guys doing up so early?”

  “We’r
e gonna make breakfast for Mom and Dad when they come home,” said Sage.

  “Will you help us?” asked Ty. “We don’t actually know how to make anything.”

  Leigh ran up to Rose and tugged on the leg of her jeans. “Look what I found, Rosie!” Rose looked down and saw Leigh clutching her old Polaroid camera.

  “Why do you have that?” Rose asked.

  “I wanna picture!” Leigh said, her eyes wide and her voice high and squeaky. She pointed at Rose and her brothers.

  “Come in for a picture, mi hermana,” said Ty. And he put one arm around Rose and another around Sage, and then Rose picked up Leigh and held her close, the camera turned around in her hands so that it was aimed at the four of them. There was a flash as Leigh snapped a photo.

  Sage blew on the picture when it fell out of the camera and handed it to Leigh. Everyone leaned in to watch the picture develop.

  After a minute, the images of Rose and her siblings came to life on paper: Ty standing tall with his spiky red hair; Sage, pudgy, with his curly orange hair; Leigh, whose mouth was wide-open; and Rose, with her long dark hair, the black sheep.

  “I’m going to keep this one,” Rose told her sister. She took the picture and stuffed it in the pocket of her shirt, right over her heart.

  “Why are you crying, Rose?” Sage asked. “You don’t look that bad in the picture.”

  Rose wiped a salty tear from her cheek. “I just… I love you guys, is all.”

  Ty and Sage looked at Rose like she had five heads. Leigh just hugged her big sister’s leg.

  “I mean, we love you too, Rosita,” said Ty. “Duh! That goes without saying!”

  Rose peeled off her sister and ran from the bathroom. She couldn’t stand to look at their faces anymore.

  “Where are you going, weirdo?” Sage yelled. “What is wrong with girls?”

  “I’ll be right back!” Rose shouted from the top of the stairs. But she wouldn’t be right back. At least they wouldn’t have to miss her.

  Downstairs she found Aunt Lily, who had baked the biscuits and arranged them in a picnic basket on the table with a note that said, “Please Eat.”