Kathryn Littlewood - Rose Bliss Cooks up Magic

Rose gulped and felt something soft butt against her ankle. She looked down and found Gus the cat, who looked up at her. “A wayward wish is a bitter dish,” he said, then threaded himself around her legs. “Told you so!”

EXACTLY TWENTY-SEVEN DAYS later, Rose woke to find her bedroom toasty warm like the inside of a sock fresh from the dryer.

She had suffered through twenty-seven days of waking to morning cold throughout the house, the ovens turned off, the front windows shuttered, the bakery closed for business. Twenty-seven days of living with the guilt that she, Rosemary Bliss, had brought a chill onto her town just by making a simple little wish.

She stretched in her bed and listened to her bones creak and was thankful that it was a warm Saturday in June. There was no need to drag herself through the sad-sack halls of Calamity Falls Middle School. Like everyone else in town, her fellow students had taken a turn for the worse since the Follow Your Bliss Bakery had closed. The teachers lost their pep, the sports teams lost their matches – even the cheerleaders had lost their enthusiasm. “Rah,” they’d mumble at games, halfheartedly shaking their pompoms.

Worst of all, Devin Stetson was affected too, his blond bangs sitting lank and greasy on his forehead. Rose wondered what she’d ever seen in him at all.

And Rose was droopier than anyone: she alone, among all the people in Calamity Falls, knew that she was the reason the bakery had closed.

“Just another week,” she muttered to herself as she lay there.

“Shhhhhh!” a little voice cried from beside her. “Sleeping!”

Rose whipped back the covers, exposing the snoring bundle of pyjamas that was her younger sister, Leigh, curled up like a comma in the space where the bed met the wall.

“Leigh,” Rose said, “you’ve got to stop sneaking into my bed!”

“But I get scared,” Leigh said, batting her dark eyelashes, and Rose felt guilty all over again. Her four-year-old sister’s sudden night frights were probably Rose’s fault, too.

“Another week of what?” someone else purred. Curled up in a tight comma against her sister’s chest was Gus. He opened one green eye and glared at her. The cat had been able to talk as long as Rose had known him – ever since he’d eaten some Chattering Cheddar Biscuits her great-great-great-grandfather had made, in fact. But she was shocked anew every time he opened his tiny whiskered mouth and spoke. “Cat got your tongue?” he asked.

“Until school is out for the summer,” Rose said. “I can’t take it anymore. Everyone’s so mopey!” She sucked in a deep lungful of air and felt comforted by the soft scent of cinnamon and nutmeg. “Someone’s baking!” she exclaimed.

Gus stretched out his front paws and leaned forward, his tail rising straight like an exclamation point. “This is a bakery, you know.”

“But, but, but – we’ve been closed! By order of the government!”

Leigh blinked and scratched Gus’s rumpled grey ears. Since being freed from Lily’s awful spell that caused her to praise her aunt incessantly, Leigh had taken on a Buddha-like serenity, and rarely opened her mouth except to speak the simple truth.

“Closed,” the little girl said calmly, touching the wrinkle in Rose’s forehead, “is just an opportunity to be open in a different way.”

Rose scrunched up her face. “Well, open or closed, if we’re baking, we’re breaking the law,” she said. “We’d better get downstairs.”

Dressed in a red T-shirt and tan shorts, Rose arrived in the kitchen with Leigh and Gus just as Chip entered from the bakery – Chip was an ex-marine who usually helped customers in the store. Rose didn’t know what they’d do without him.

“I don’t understand why I’m here,” he said. “The sign on the front still says CLOSED. The blinds are still drawn. The lights are still off.”

“Good, Chip,” Purdy said. “Now take a seat so I can explain to everyone what’s going on.”

He sat on a stool at the head of the table in the breakfast nook, where Rose’s parents, brothers, and Balthazar were huddled around the table, with its overflowing pile of fan mail. Rose’s father, Albert, held the official letter that had come from the United States government, reading it over and over, as if he expected to find some tiny footnote that negated the whole thing. “This law makes no sense – no sense at all!” he muttered under his breath. Leigh crawled under the breakfast table and re-emerged in her mother’s lap. Rose slid in beside her brothers.

“I agree: It makes no sense,” Rose’s mother announced. “That’s why, beginning today, the Follow Your Bliss Bakery is back in business.”

“But, Purdy!” Albert protested. “That would be breaking the law!”

“Honey, the government says we can’t operate,” said Balthazar, wiping the top of his bald head with a handkerchief. “This document is perfectly clear: unless we employ more than a thousand people, we are shut down. That fancy lawyer, Bob Solomon, hasn’t been able to find a single loophole. And our congresswoman, Big Nell Katey – well, she hasn’t made a bit of headway with those other politicians down in Washington. They’ve got good hearts, the both of them, but we’re up against something sneaky here.”

Gus arched his back and hissed. He began to scratch at the wooden base of the breakfast table like it was a cage full of mice.

“Gus,” Purdy said gently. “No scratching, please.”

Gus sank to the ground and twisted miserably until he was lying on his back. “I’m sorry. It’s how Scottish Folds cope with sneakiness.”

“The law says that we can’t operate for profit ,” Purdy explained with a strange glint in her eye. “It says nothing about operating as a charitable organization. We have to stop selling baked goods, but we don’t have to stop baking !”

Ty’s jaw dropped. “You can’t be suggesting that we—”

“—give our baked goods away for free !” Sage finished.

Ty put his head in his hands, careful not to mess up his hair. “I can’t believe what I’m hearing. We’ll never get rich this way!”

“Giving our goods away is exactly what I’m suggesting,” Purdy said. “Our work is bigger than simple profits. Calamity Falls needs us.”

Sage groaned theatrically.

Beside her, Albert smiled and folded up the letter. “We won’t be able to give away our Bliss baked goods forever – we can’t afford to do that. But we can at least do so until we find some way around this backward law.”

“I just know this is Lily’s fault.” Balthazar rose from the breakfast table and began to pace around the room, scratching his beard. “May none of you forget: Lily never returned Albatross’s Apocrypha . I’ll bet you a loaf of Betray-Yourself Banana Bread that Lily is using the sinister recipes in that little booklet to wreak havoc on the government. I should have destroyed it when I had the chance back in 1972.”

Rose’s great-great-great-grandfather was fond of warning the family about the dangers of Albatross’s Apocrypha , a pamphlet of particularly meddlesome and nasty recipes written long-ago by a black sheep in the Bliss family. Usually, the Apocrypha was tucked into a pocket at the back of the Bliss Cookery Booke , but when Lily had returned the Booke after she lost the Gala des Gâteaux Grands in Paris, the Apocrypha was missing.