Bliss (3 page)

“This'll take me half an hour,” he said. “You may want to come back.”

Sage let out a ridiculously loud groan, but Rose was happy. Kline's just happened to sit at the base of Sparrow Hill, and Stetson's just happened to sit at the top.

“Hey, buddy,” she said. “Let's walk up Sparrow Hill.”

“No way!” Sage said. “That hill is way too high and it's way too hot. I'm gonna see if they have any new jelly bean flavors at Calamity Confections.”

“Come on,” said Rose, catching him by the shoulder. “It'll be nice. We can stand on the fence at the lookout point and find our house. And I'll buy you a donut.”

“Fine. But,” he said, raising one finger high above his head, “I get to pick the donut!”

5. Stetson's Donuts and Automotive Repair

Rose was panting by the time they reached the top of the hill. Stetson's was an unimpressive concrete hut adorned with the parts of old cars. Pansies grew out of tires on the ground, and a
DONUTS
sign hung from an old fender fixed above the doorframe.

Rose trembled as she scooped her black hair, now goopy with sweat, away from her forehead. She was the kind of girl who was unafraid of spiders, dirt bikes, or burning her fingers in a hot oven—and she'd had plenty of encounters with each. But walking into the same room as a boy she liked? Now
that
was frightening.

Just as she gathered the courage to walk down the drive and enter the store, Devin Stetson breezed by on his moped, blond bangs flapping in the wind, and sped down the hill. Apparently his father had given him the morning off.

Rose's stomach turned. It was the same sensation as when you fly higher than you should on a swing set and you can feel your stomach a beat behind, flopping around inside you like a fish on the deck of a boat.

As she watched him go, she could swear he turned for a second and glanced back at her.

Sage had already ambled up to the lookout point and climbed to the second rail of the fence. “Whoa. Rose. Look.”

Rose shook herself and jogged over to see what Sage was talking about: A caravan of police cars was driving along the winding road that cut through town. Calamity Falls looked like a painting from the top of Sparrow Hill, and the cars looked like a blue and white knife slashing through it.

“Where are they going?” asked Sage, uncharacteristically quiet.

“Oh boy,” Rose said, squinting. “I think they're going to the bakery.”

CHAPTER 2

A Hammer Falls

“
M
aybe Ty was arrested,” said Rose.

She and Sage threw their bikes down in the Bliss bakery backyard and ran toward the back door. Three police cruisers formed a fence outside the house, and a white Hummer with tinted windows squatted in the driveway like a fat pit bull.

Through the open driver's-side window of the Hummer, Rose and Sage could see a man wearing a crisp police uniform and sunglasses. He was speaking into a walkie-talkie. “They're still in there,” he was saying. “I know them—they won't come out empty handed.”

Rose stepped on a cinder block and peered through the open shutters of one of the kitchen windows. Her parents were standing on one side of the great wooden chopping block that Purdy rolled around like a shopping cart. A woman in a stern navy pantsuit stood on the other side. Purdy and Albert looked at each other nervously while Purdy kept a hand on the Bliss Cookery Booke, which sat closed on the chopping block. When the book was open, it looked like a fat white bird spreading its wings; closed, it looked vulnerable, like a little loaf of brown bread.

This is it
, Rose thought.
Someone has come for the book
.

Every Tuesday evening, Albert and Purdy went to two-for-one night at the Calamity Falls Movie Theater and left their neighbor Mrs. Carlson in charge. As Albert left, he'd always say, “Don't let anyone in! It might be the government coming to steal our recipes!”

The kids always laughed, but Rose knew that her father wasn't really joking. She'd glimpsed pages in the book with medieval drawings of storms, fire, a wall of thorns, a man bleeding—recipes you wouldn't want to fall into the hands of someone who might actually use them.

Sage climbed up on the cinder block but couldn't see through the window. “What's going on?” he asked.

“They're going to take the cookbook,” she said, struggling to push the words past a massive lump in her throat. She looked in at the strange cast-iron stove that sat like a dark beehive against one wall of the kitchen, at the row of glistening cherrywood cabinets that lined the other, at the tangle of racks and metal hooks that hung in a cluster from the center of the ceiling and held at their ends every conceivable size of metal spatula and spoon, at the giant silver stand mixer that sat in the back corner, with a bowl so big that Leigh could (and sometimes did) climb inside, and a twirling dough hook the size of a rowboat's oar. She stared at everything her parents had built, shabby as it was, and stifled a sob.

She imagined her parents locked in a dirty jail cell, her brothers begging on the streets, the country ruled by a mob of tyrannical bakers who used muffins and pies as their weapons of mass destruction.

“I'll stop them,” Sage muttered, and rushed around to the back door. He threw it open and shouted, “My parents didn't do anything!”

Albert and Purdy spun around inside the kitchen and tried to shush Sage, but it was too late. The woman in the navy pantsuit stared out the backdoor and motioned for Sage and Rose to come inside.

“My name is Janice ‘The Hammer' Hammer,” she said. “I'm the mayor of Humbleton.” She flashed a strained smile, and Rose realized that though this wasn't the friendliest woman she'd ever met, she wasn't there to steal their book, either.

“Why are the police here?” said Rose.

“Those are cars that I had painted to look like police cars so that I'd look more intimidating whenever I went on a trip. The men inside are my colleagues on the Humbleton Board of Trustees. One is a florist, one is a lawyer, and the third is a plumber who fills in when he doesn't have any toilets to unclog.”

“Isn't it illegal to dress up like a police officer?” Sage prodded.

Mayor Hammer just glared at him. “I came to ask your parents for help in fighting a summer flu in Humbleton. I've never seen one this bad—it's like a plague. Garbage cans overflowing with Kleenex. Doctors totally out of cough drops. The ear, nose, and throat guy fleeing in terror to his condo in Florida. Wimp.”

Albert and Purdy laughed nervously.

“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 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 anymore. 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 checkbook. She scribbled some numbers on a check 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 check.

Purdy tore the check 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 gray 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. “Mom and Dad are going away!
Please
come downstairs.”

It was only eleven in the morning, and Ty rarely emerged from his cave before midafternoon. 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.”

“Mom 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-checkered 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 neighbors 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.”