Bliss (6 page)

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 okay! 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 colors, 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 toward Rose. “Morning, Rosie!”

Lily touched his shoulder. “Chip, darling, Rose and I need some girl time. Go 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 heaping spoonfuls of egg white onto 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 around the block. “See those people? I know all of them.”

“Tell me about them,” said Lily gently.

“Okay, 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 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 grayish 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. 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 slide show 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 around 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 rivaled 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 mom would have been cooking from something more … special.”

“Nope, this is it,” Rose said nervously. “Ordinary recipes. My mom 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 anymore, 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 knit 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 snuck 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 traveling 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 around 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 toward 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 around the tiny white porcelain sink in their flannel pajamas 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 around, inside and out.

Sage sat on the little rocking chair next to the clawfoot 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 around her neck. “We can't do it. I promised.”

“Fine!” shouted Sage. “So just 'cause you're afraid of Mom 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 Mom 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?