Kathryn Littlewood - Bliss

Sage giggled and squirmed. “Who are you?”

Lily pressed a finger to his nose and rubbed it back and forth. “I’m your aunt Lily!” she said, and curtseyed with a flourish. “And I’ve come to rejoin my family!”

“My mother isn’t here,” Rose said, fidgeting with the hem of her shirt.

Aunt Lily walked over to her motorcycle and unhooked a small tweed suitcase and a smaller bag in the shape of a log, made of crushed crimson velvet that changed colour depending on the way you looked at it.

“Looks like I arrived at just the right time, Rose!” said Lily. “What better way to show your parents I want to heal our troubled relationship than to help their children out when they’re away?”

Rose thought that the whole thing sounded fishy, at best. She prayed that her parents would suddenly waltz back into the driveway and announce that they’d forgotten their underwear.

But there was no waltzing.

“Maybe you should come back when my parents are here.”

Lily made a face like a wounded dog. “I just thought I could help. With the bakery.” She picked up her suitcase and bag and gingerly hooked them on to the back of her motorcycle. “But I can see that you’d like me to go.”

“Noooooooo!” Sage yelled. “Rose, what are you doing? You can’t send a family member away! I mean, she has the ladle!”

Rose looked at the glamorous professional baker who was offering to help her for a week. Then she looked at Sage, her only sous-chef, who chose that moment to pick at his nose. There would be too much work that week for her and Chip to do by themselves, and she had a feeling that Ty and Sage and Leigh were not going to step up to the plate. Besides, there was something about this woman that made Rose unable to look away from her – even if she was fishy, at best.

“Wait!” Rose called to Lily. “I guess… we really could use the help.”

“Wheeeee!” cried Lily. “I know exactly what we’ll make for dinner tonight!”

What we’ll make for dinner tonight.

Rose couldn’t help but happily notice Aunt Lily had said we.

Mrs Carlson shuffled into the back garden later that afternoon. She had her short blond hair in curlers and wore a sequinned top and white leggings that were too tight. In one hand she carried a portable TV, and in the other hand she carried a box of porridge and a thing in a clear plastic bag that looked like a stomach, and smelled like worse.

Sage pinched the end of his nose. “What is that?”

“I’m going to make haggis,” Mrs Carlson said in her thick Scottish brogue. “Haggis is porridge boiled in the stomach of a sheep. It’ll put hair on your chest.”

Sage clutched at his chest.

“That’s very kind of you, Mrs Carlson, but it won’t be necessary,” Rose said nervously.

Mrs Carlson tilted her head sideways to look at Rose. “Why?”

“Well,” Rose began, “our aunt has come for a visit, and she’s already started making dinner.”

Mrs Carlson grunted. “Your father didn’t say anything about an aunt!”

Rose looked around nervously. “He… forgot she was coming. But she’s here now. And she’ll do all the cooking this week.”

Mrs Carlson shuffled over to the metal rubbish bin by the back door and dumped the sheep’s stomach inside. “Good. I didn’t really want haggis anyway.”

Since the entire first floor of the Bliss house was the bakery, the family spent most of their time in the evening crammed round the table in the kitchen. It wasn’t so much a table as a booth, like one you’d find at a diner – two high-backed benches of dark wood with red leather cushions facing each other, separated by a varnished cherrywood table and a medieval-looking cast-iron chandelier above. The family ate breakfast, lunch and dinner in the booth, and often gathered after dinner to resume a never-ending game of crazy eights, trying their best not to elbow one another as they picked cards up and slammed others down.

The boys banged the end of their forks and knives on top of the table and shouted, “Li-ly! Li-ly!” as they waited for dinner. Leigh perched on top of the table like a frog, her knobby knees flanking her ears. Mrs Carlson sat squished between Ty and Sage, clutching her leather purse to her chest. “A family of animals!” Mrs Carlson exclaimed.

Rose shrugged, feeling invisible compared to her louder-than-life siblings.

Aunt Lily had been puttering around in the background of the kitchen for the last hour. She had changed out of her black leather motorcycle outfit and into a flowing white cotton dress, which made her look impossibly tall and clean and elegant, even as she worked in the hot, cramped kitchen. After a while, she set a giant orange serving platter in the centre of the table.

“Paella valenciana!” she shouted. “This is a rice dish from Spain. I learned to make it while I was studying classical guitar outside Barcelona.”

It was a pile of fragrant rice stained the delicate orange colour of saffron, with pieces of chicken, spicy red sausage and a slew of edible sea creatures.

“This looks delicioso, Tía Lily!” Ty exclaimed, even though he normally refused to eat anything but buttered noodles and liquorice. Tonight he was wearing a crisp button-down and had spiked his hair with gel. Rose guessed it had something to do with the gorgeous woman puttering around the kitchen.

“I just think seafood is so much fun!” Lily said. “My father used to bring mussels and shrimps and clams home all the time. He was a fisherman.”

“So your side of the family aren’t bakers?” Rose asked, thinking that maybe the birthmark on Lily’s shoulder might actually be a fishhook instead of a ladle.

“They tried to be,” Lily began, “but they didn’t have the right… stuff. So they all moved to Nova Scotia and became fishermen instead. But I didn’t want that kind of life. So I bought a motorcycle and ran away to New York City to be a glamorous actress!”

“I went there once,” croaked Mrs Carlson through a big gulp of orange rice. “Someone stole my purse, and then a pigeon dropped a you-know-what on my head.”

The Bliss kids burst into laughter.

“Sounds like New York City to me!” said Lily, fanning herself. “When I arrived, I soared down Broadway on Trixie – that’s my motorcycle – and I felt so desperately, magnificently alive! Then I realised I had nowhere to live, and only enough money for a few hot dogs! So I bought myself a few hot dogs, and I ate them in Central Park.”

“That’s exactly what I would have done, Tía Lily,” said Ty in his deepest voice. Rose had never seen her brother try so hard to be friendly. And now he was calling this strange woman Tía Lily like he’d known her all his life.

“Yes!” Lily cried. “Sometimes one must have a hot dog! In any case, I was wandering west on Seventieth Street, and it was getting dark. I looked over and I saw a little cupcake shop with white shutters and adorable yellow curtains, and a sign in the window saying they needed an assistant. So I marched right in there and I said, ‘I will assist you for free if you will let me sleep in the kitchen.’ And they did! And that is where I learned to bake.”

“Can you take me with you when you go back?” said Sage.

Leigh stood up and began bouncing up and down on the table. “New York City! New York City!”

“Maybe I will take you to New York one day,” Lily said, placing a hand softly on Leigh’s back to still her while Mrs Carlson just sat there grimacing. “But I won’t be going back for a while. I’m going to host my own TV show, you see. It will be called 30-Minute Magic. So I am travelling around looking for the best recipes in the country, recipes that are wonderful enough to share with the world.”