Bliss (12 page)

CHAPTER 9

Love from On High

L
ily repeated her question: “What were you up to in there, Rose? Your color is all gone.”

Rose turned and surveyed her reflection in the gray steel of the walk-in fridge and saw that her skin was, in fact, the color of dental floss.

“I was just … getting a glass of orange juice,” Rose lied.

Lily knelt down and touched Rose's cheek and said, “Rose, you were in there for ten minutes, and you haven't brought out any juice. And you're freezing!” She wrapped her arms around Rose. “Sit here on my knee.”

Rose lowered herself onto the thigh of her fake aunt's gray pinstripes and sat there awkwardly, like a child on a mall Santa.

“Now, tell me the truth,” Lily said gently. “What are you hiding back there, behind that tapestry?”

Rose tried to hide her surprise. How did Lily know there was something behind that tapestry? She
must
have eavesdropped on Rose and Ty and Sage arguing back and forth as they copied down the recipes the morning before, when Rose found a purple sequin from Lily's pants on the floor of the fridge.

Rose wanted to tell her aunt about the book and the Love Muffins gone wrong and the Cookies of Truth gone, unfortunately,
right
—but her parents had told her to protect the secret of the Bliss Cookery Booke, and she had to obey her parents.

So instead of spilling her guts, Rose countered with an equally important question: “Why were you eavesdropping on us yesterday morning?”

Aunt Lily looked her straight in the eye, and Rose stared right back, marveling at the dark glimmer of Lily's brown eyes and the jaunty ramp of her eyelashes, which were so long that they looked like the kind of eyelashes a woman in a cartoon bats for attention. “I eavesdropped because I was worried, Rose. The three of you, getting up that early to hang out in a refrigerator, and then staying up all night to make cookies—”

Rose barely managed a whisper: “But we were so quiet!”

Lily laughed. “Rose! I am a creature of the night.” She patted Rose on the head like Rose was five and not twelve. Rose hated that. “Now, I appreciate your enthusiasm for baking, I really do. You are a natural. But if you are doing all this sneaking around because you're in some kind of trouble, or because you're hiding a secret…”

Rose's pulse quickened and she felt a movement in her throat, the kind you feel when you're about to vomit up either the truth or your dinner. Aunt Lily was too smart. There was no hiding anything from her.

“Maybe a secret that someone else asked you to keep. A friend, maybe, or … a parent.”

Rose twitched.

“An adult should never ask a child to keep one of their secrets,” Lily said gravely. “It isn't fair.” She gave Rose's shoulder a squeeze.

Rose was about to come out with it, the whole thing. Lily was right: It wasn't fair for her parents to ask Rose to keep this tremendous secret—not just the secret of the locked-away Cookery Booke, but the secret of their family magic. Rose had been hiding it her whole life. The only people she could ever tell about the lightning in the bottle or the clouds or the nightingale or the warlock's eye were her brothers, and they didn't care. Her parents had made it so that she could never really be honest with
anyone
.

“I—I—I—” Rose began.

A look of impatience flashed over Lily's face—it was a subtle narrowing of her eyes and crinkling of her eyebrows. It passed like the shadow of a quickly moving cloud, but it lingered just long enough to make Rose hold her tongue.

What was it about Aunt Lily that made Rose suspicious? Until she figured out what that was, she couldn't expose her family's secret.

“Behind that tapestry is another refrigerator where my parents keep the really good chocolate,” said Rose. “We snuck in there the other morning and ate some. It was wrong of us. So I locked it, and I'm holding the key so Ty and Sage can't get in there again.” Rose exhaled so hard that she coughed, then got up off her fake aunt's knee.

Lily stood up too. “Thank you for being honest,” she said, a little gruffly.

A moment of uncomfortable silence was broken when Leigh and Sage ran into the kitchen and began jumping up and down, rattling all the pots and pans.

“Mrs. Carlson fell asleep in front of her little TV,” Sage said, the words getting lost amid his jumps.

“Stop jumping, guys,” said Rose.

“I can't!” cried Sage. “I've been doing it for so long, I can't stop! I have to eat something to weigh me down!”

“What do you two want to eat?” Lily asked.

Sage was about to answer when Leigh cut in. “Snails!” she shouted.

“Ugh!” Sage dropped to the floor and squirmed around, gagging. Rose knew that his fear and hatred of snails and slugs was not an exaggeration, and that the very mention of them really did make him gag.

Lily herself looked a little disgusted. “She wants snails from the garden?” she ventured.

“No,” answered Rose. “She wants escargots. We have to go to Pierre Guillaume's French bistro.” Rose was used to this weekly ritual. It was strange that a three-year-old should love eating escargots so much, but ever since the first time Leigh popped one of the rubbery, garlicky, buttery snails into her mouth, there was no stopping her. “Leigh has to have escargots once a week, or she gets very grumpy.”

Lily's face lit up. “A French bistro?” she cried, pronouncing the
r
in
bistro
the way the French would—that is, almost coughing. “Say no more!”

Then Aunt Lily noticed Sage, who was still writhing in disgust on the floor. “What about Sage?”

“Sage,” Rose answered, smoothing his curly red mop, “will sit on the other end of the table and avert his eyes.”

In her bedroom, Rose put on her favorite dress, a simple blue one with a skirt that started practically at the collar. She wasn't sure that she felt pretty—her eyebrows were too dark, her nose was too stubby—but when she was wearing the dress she at least felt pretti
er
. Pretty
ish
.

Then she helped Leigh change out of the filthy red-and-white-striped shirt she wore every day and put on her freshly washed backup red-and-white-striped shirt, which Albert and Purdy kept on hand for whenever Leigh had to look presentable. She insisted on bringing her Polaroid camera.

Meanwhile, Aunt Lily went downstairs to consult the wardrobe in her seemingly bottomless suitcase and emerged looking extra Parisian, wearing a blue-and-white-striped T-shirt and a black beret that dangled to one side of her head. Chip kept on the shirt that he'd been wearing, and Sage saw fit to wear the baggy blue T-shirt that he'd been sweating in all morning. All in all, they looked optimistic, if not fabulous.

Except for Aunt Lily, who would look fabulous even in a burlap sack.

Aunt Lily popped on a pair of fancy sunglasses and spread both her arms wide into the air. “Off we go! The bakery is closed for the day, and we are taking a holiday!” It seemed she could make a holiday out of anything.

Rose and Lily held on to Leigh's hands and swung her back and forth like an orangutan toward the town square while Chip and Sage trailed behind.

Rose looked over at her aunt, who had her face turned to the sun and seemed to be savoring every second of daylight like it was vanilla pudding.

“Do you know how I feel right now, Rose?” Lily said, smiling.

Rose shook her head no.

“I feel insouciant.” Lily stretched out the foreign-sounding word like it was a piece of toffee:
innnnn … soooooo … seeeeee … annnnnntttt
. “See, in French,
souci
means
worry
. So
in
souciant means
without worry
, without care. I am without a care! Isn't that just delicious?”

Chip chimed in from where he was marching five feet behind them. “In that case, I am also insouciant.”

Rose relaxed her shoulders, which she had been keeping scrunched up near her ears for the past few hours. The soft cotton of her flowing skirt brushed up against her legs in the breeze like a cat looking to get fed, and she felt, for a moment, like all would be well. A few overly frank librarians were not the worst things in the world. The cookies would wear off sooner or later, and everything would go back to normal, including Rose, who would once again resume her position as the girl who quietly did everything right.

A moment later they swung into the town square, an open plaza made of terra-cotta bricks that practically glowed in the sun. In the center of the plaza was a marble statue of the town's founder, Reginald Calamity, milking a cow. In summertime, the statue served as a fountain, and streams of water poured out of the cow's udder. Rose thought that was tasteless, and that the Calamity Falls Civic Association should get a new statue, one with less … milking.

Lily stood near the statue for a minute and stared up at it. “Interesting.”

As they swung past the statue toward the café tables of Pierre Guillaume's, Rose saw a line of about fifty people waiting outside the restaurant.

“What the heck?” Rose said. “Since when do you need a reservation at Pierre Guillaume's?”

Then Rose noticed that the people weren't so much in a line as they were bunched together in a noisy crowd, and that everyone in the crowd was staring upward to the top of the restaurant, where Pierre Guillaume had, a few months ago, installed a four-story steel replica of the Eiffel Tower.

Then Rose saw what everyone was looking at.

Mr. Bastable was scaling Pierre Guillaume's fake Eiffel Tower.

He had somehow managed to get to the roof of the restaurant—probably by use of the ladder that was leaning against the building—and was now climbing, rung by rung, up the tower. Around them, the townspeople were calling out, “Mr. Bastable! Don't do it!” and “Come back down!” but he ignored them.

Pierre Guillaume came out of his restaurant in his white chef's coat and hat to greet the crowd.
“Ooh la la!”
he squealed. “I have never had so many customers! Some of you may have to wait, but worry not! I shall serve one and all…” He trailed off when he realized that the crowd gathered outside his restaurant had nothing to do with his food. He turned and looked up and quietly repeated himself: “Ooh la la.”

Rose's pulse quickened. Did this daring stunt have anything to do with the cookie that Chip had served Mr. Bastable? Was it because of yesterday's muffin? Was this the natural result of two magical recipes churning in the stomach of a shy frog enthusiast?

Pierre Guillaume was near tears. “
Monsieur! Monsieur! Excusez-moi!
You cannot climb up there! My fake Tour Eiffel will not hold your weight!
Monsieur!
You are climbing to your death!”

But Mr. Bastable continued, undaunted.

Pierre Guillaume, in a panic, ran toward the firehouse two blocks down. “Help! Help! The frog man is on my tower!”

Mr. Bastable finally reached the top. He wrapped his skinny arms and legs around the fake steel beams and clung with all his might as a gust of wind blew past him, whipping his puffy white hair against his cheeks.

He gazed down at the crowd, clearly terrified, and then up at the sky. Rose hoped that he had just gone crazy on his own, and it had nothing to do with cookies or muffins or Miss Thistle.

But then he began to shout.

“I, Bernard Bastable, am in love with Miss Felidia Thistle!”

Rose cringed. It was worse than she'd feared. The Love Muffins and the Cookies of Truth had combined into a powerful spell all its own.

“I want to nibble on her lady fingers!” he shouted, a broad smile on his face. “Oh, I want to kiss her nose and bake her a pie! I want to put some pie on her nose and lick it off!” Everyone in the crowd groaned and looked away, embarrassed.

“Felidia Thistle is the most sensational creature in this town—or in any town, for that matter! I want to watch her stomp grapes! She will be my queen!” As he said this, Mr. Bastable threw both his arms wide, and the tower creaked and leaned a bit to the right. He winced and hugged the tower again.

But no one was watching him anymore. Everyone had turned their attention to the marble statue of Reginald Calamity, where Miss Thistle was staring at the roof of Pierre Guillaume's like someone had crashed a bus on it.

Mr. Bastable spied Miss Thistle standing there in front of the fountain. “Felidia!” he shouted. “You are my darling, my peach pie, my sweet crumpet! My only, my one true! Say you love me too!”

It seemed as though Miss Thistle was about to say something, but she clapped her hands over her mouth so that whatever she yelled got trapped in her teeth.

Clinging to the tower with only his legs, Mr. Bastable pulled off his frog sweatshirt to reveal a skimpy white undershirt. The words
MARRY ME
! were printed across the front in red paint.

“Felidia! Let me be your frog prince!” he yelled again.

Miss Thistle started to shout, “I—,” but again muffled herself, this time by pulling the neck of her gray turtleneck over her head.

Then Mr. Bastable did something truly embarrassing: While holding tight to the tower with one hand, he unbuttoned his slacks with the other, then dropped his pants into a rumpled pile atop the roof of Pierre Guillaume's.

In his red polka-dotted boxer shorts, Mr. Bastable scooted around so that his bottom was facing the crowd. There was a phrase painted on the back of the boxers: “
NO IFS, ANDS, OR BUTTS
!”

“It's disgusting,” Chip muttered.

Leigh was cackling like she'd never cackled before.

Sage looked like he might vomit.

Aunt Lily turned to Rose. “You've got to applaud his enthusiasm,” she said.

But Rose was looking the other way, at Miss Thistle, who was shaking her head so violently that her glasses had fallen into the fountain.