Kathryn Littlewood - Bliss

“Rose!” Sage exclaimed. “Let’s show her the book!”

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 OK! 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 colours, 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 towards Rose. “Morning, Rosie!”

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

“Tell me about them,” said Lily gently.

“OK, 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 of 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 greyish 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. And 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 slideshow 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 round 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 rivalled 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 mum would have been cooking from something more… special.”

“Nope, this is it,” Rose said nervously. “Ordinary recipes. My mum 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 any more, 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.