Bliss (2 page)

“Rose!” her mother shouted. “Can you come down to the kitchen?”

Rose heaved herself out of bed and stumbled down the wooden staircase, still in her undershirt and flannel shorts.

The kitchen of the Bliss home also happened to be the kitchen of the Follow Your Bliss Bakery, which Rose's parents operated out of a sunny front room that faced a bustling street in Calamity Falls. Where most families had a couch and a television, the Blisses had a counter filled with pies, a cash register, and a few booths and benches for customers.

Purdy Bliss was standing in the center of the kitchen amid a wreck of spilled metal bowls, little mountains of flour, an overturned sack of sugar, and the brilliant orange yolks of a dozen cracked eggs. White cake flour was still swirling in the air like smoke.

Rose's little sister, Leigh Bliss, sat in the center of the floor with her Polaroid camera around her neck and raw egg smeared on her cheek. She smiled gleefully as she snapped a photo of the wreckage.

“Parsley Bliss,” Purdy began. “You ran through this kitchen and knocked over all the ingredients for this morning's poppy muffins. You
know
that people are waiting for our poppy muffins. And now they're not going to get any.”

Leigh frowned for a moment, ashamed, then grinned widely and ran out of the room. She was still too young to feel bad about anything for longer than a minute.

Purdy threw her hands up in the air and laughed. “It's a good thing she's so cute.”

Rose looked with horror at the mess on the floor. “Can I help clean?”

“No, I'll get your dad to do it.
But
,” Purdy ventured, handing Rose a list scrawled on the back of an envelope, “you could ride into town and pick up these ingredients.” She looked again at the wreckage on the floor. “It's a bit of an emergency.”

“Sure, Mom,” Rose said, resigned to her fate as the family courier.

“Oh!” Purdy cried. “I almost forgot.” She removed the silver chain from her neck and handed it to Rose. The chain carried what Rose always assumed was a charm, but which, on closer inspection, revealed itself to be a silver key in the shape of a tiny whisk.

“Go to the locksmith and get a copy made of this key. We're going to need it. This is very, very important, Rosemary.”

Rose examined the key. It was beautiful and delicate—like a spider touching all its toes together. She'd seen her mother wearing it like a charm around her neck, but always assumed it was just another one of her mother's bizarre jewelry choices, like the butterfly brooch whose wings spanned half a foot, or the hat-shaped hat pin.

“And when you're done, you can go buy yourself a Stetson's donut. Even though I don't know why you like them. They're quite inferior.”

Rose, in fact,
hated
the taste of Stetson's donuts. They were too dry and too cakey and tasted a little like cough syrup—what else could you expect from donuts served up at a place called Stetson's Donut and Automotive Repair? But buying one meant getting to drop seventy-five cents into the outstretched hand of Devin Stetson.

Devin Stetson, who was twelve like her but seemed so much older, who sang tenor in the Calamity Falls Community Chorus, who had sandy blond hair that fell in his eyes, and who knew how to repair a torn fan belt.

Whenever he passed her in the halls at school, she found an excuse to stare at her shoes. In fact, the most she'd ever said to him in real life was
Thanks for the donut
, but in her brain they had already sped alongside the river on his moped, had made a picnic in the middle of an open field and read poetry out loud and let the long grass tickle their faces, had kissed under a streetlamp in the fall. Maybe today she would cross one of those off her list of things to do in real life with Devin Stetson. Or not. What would he want with a baker?

Rose turned to go get dressed.

“Oh, and another thing!” Purdy cried again. “Take your little brother with you.”

Rose looked past the mess in the kitchen and through the side door into the yard, where her younger brother, Sage Bliss, was bouncing with gusto on their giant trampoline, shouting theatrically, still in his pajamas.

Rose groaned. Carrying ingredients in the front basket of her bike was hard enough, but dragging Sage from door to door made the whole thing ten times harder.

1. Borzini's Nuttery. / lb. poppy seeds
.

Rose and Sage leaned their bikes against the stuccoed storefront of Borzini's Nuttery and went inside. You really couldn't miss Borzini's Nuttery. It was the only store in Calamity Falls shaped like a peanut.

Sage marched immediately to a barrel of Mr. Borzini's fanciest imported Ethiopian macadamia nuts, shoved his arms into the barrel, and tossed dozens of the nuts in the air. Rose stared at her brother as he scrambled like a nervous juggler to catch the macadamias in his mouth before they hit the floor.

At nine years old, Sage already looked like he belonged onstage at a comedy club. A mess of curly strawberry-blond hair exploded from the top of his head, and two freckled, pudgy cheeks took up most of his face. His red eyebrows hovered over his eyes in a look of permanent confusion.

“Sage, why are you doing that?” said Rose.

“I saw Ty do it with popcorn, and he caught most of it in his mouth.”

Ty was their big brother, the oldest Bliss child, and he had one of those faces that made everyone melt. He had wavy red hair and wild gray eyes like a Siberian husky. He was fifteen and played every sport there was to play, and though he wasn't always the tallest, he was always the handsomest. He was exactly the sort of boy who could toss a handful of popcorn in the air and catch all of it in his mouth. The only thing he couldn't do was be bothered to help with the bakery. But their parents didn't seem to mind much. Ty's face was like a get-out-of-jail-free card that worked better and better with each passing year.

Mr. Borzini, who himself was shaped like a peanut, lumbered out from the back storage room. “Hiya, Rosie!” he said with a grin. Then he saw the macadamia nuts on the floor and his grin disappeared. “Hello, Sage.”

“We need a pound of poppy seeds,” said Rose with a smile.

“P
rrrr
onto!” Sage said, rolling the
r
like an Italian and kissing his fingers. Mr. Borzini's frown melted away and he laughed.

Mr. Borzini smiled at Rose as he handed over the seeds. “You sure got a funny brother, Rosie!”

Rose smiled back, wishing that someone thought she was as funny as Sage. She was quietly sarcastic, but that wasn't the same thing. She wasn't gorgeous, like Ty. She was too old to be adorable, like Leigh. She was good at baking, which mostly meant that she was meticulous and good at math. But no one ever smiled at her and said, “Wow! How meticulous and good at math you are, Rose!”

And so Rose had come to think of herself as merely ordinary, like a person walking silently in the background of a movie set. Oh well.

Rose thanked Mr. Borzini and loaded the burlap sack of seed into the metal basket on the front of her bike. Then she dragged her brother outside, and the two of them took off.

“I don't understand why we have to go get all this stuff,” Sage grumbled as they worked their way up a hill. “If Leigh spilled it, then
she
should have to go get it.”

“Sage. She's three.”

“I don't understand why we have to work in the stupid bakery anyway. If our parents can't run the bakery by themselves, then they shouldn't have started one in the first place.”

“You know they have to bake, it's in their blood,” Rose replied, taking a breath. “Plus, this town would collapse without them. Everyone needs our cakes and pies and muffins, just to keep going. We are running a public service.”

As much as she rolled her eyes, Rose secretly loved to help. She loved the way her mother sighed with relief whenever Rose returned with all the right ingredients, loved the way her father hugged her after she'd made a shortbread dough just crumbly enough, loved the way the townspeople hummed with happiness after taking the first warm, flaky bite of a chocolate croissant. And she loved how the mixture of ingredients—some normal, some not so normal—not only made people happy, but sometimes did much more than that.

“Well, I want a copy of the Calamity Falls child-labor codes, because I'm pretty sure what they do to us is illegal.”

Rose slowed and clamped her nose as Sage rode past. “So is the way you smell.”

Sage gasped. “I do
not
smell!” he said, but then lifted his arms in the air to double-check. “Okay, maybe a little bit!”

2. Florence the Florist. A dozen poppies
.

Rose and Sage found Florence the Florist asleep in a comfy chair in a corner. Everyone speculated about her exact age, but the consensus in Calamity Falls was that she couldn't be younger than ninety.

Her store looked more like a living room than a floral shop—yellow sunlight splashed through the shutters onto a little sofa, and a fat tabby cat lay splayed out near a dusty fireplace. A collection of vases near the window were filled with every conceivable kind of flower, and a dozen baskets hung from the ceiling with leafy green vines spilling out of them.

Rose brushed a curtain of ivy away from her face and cleared her throat.

Florence slowly opened her eyes. “Who is that?”

“It's Rosemary Bliss,” Rose said.

“Oh, I see.” Florence grumbled as if she were annoyed at the prospect of having a customer. “What … can… I … get for you?” she asked, rising and panting as she shuffled toward the vases below the window.

“A dozen poppies, please,” Rose said.

Florence groaned as she bent to collect the papery red flowers. She perked up, though, as she looked over at Sage. “Is that you, Ty? You're looking … shorter.”

Sage laughed, flattered to be mistaken for his older brother. “Oh no,” he said. “I'm
Sage
. Everyone says we look a lot alike.”

Florence grumbled for the second time. “I'll sure miss seeing that heartthrob Ty around when he goes off to college.”

Everyone always wondered what her dashingly handsome brother would do when he was finally old enough to leave Calamity Falls. As much as he seemed destined to leave, Rose herself seemed destined to stay behind. She wondered whether, if she remained in Calamity Falls, she'd end up like Florence the Florist—with nothing to do but sleep in a chair in the middle of the day, waiting for something strange and exciting to happen, knowing that it never would.

But leaving town would mean leaving the bakery. And then she would never get to know where her mother stored all those magical blue mason jars. She'd never learn how to mix a bit of northern wind into icing so that it would thaw the frozen heart of a loveless person. She'd never figure out how to fine-tune the reaction among frog's eyes, molten magma, and baking soda—which, her mother had told her, could mend broken bones almost immediately.

“And what about you, Rosemary?” Florence said as she wrapped the poppies in brown paper. “Anything exciting happening? Any boys?”

“I'm too busy babysitting Sage,” Rose said a little too forcefully.

It was true that she didn't have any time to go on dates with boys, but even if she did, she probably wouldn't anyway. A date seemed strange and a little unappealing, like sushi. She would like very much to stand with Devin Stetson at the top of Sparrow Hill and look down at the expanse of Calamity Falls, fall wind blowing through their hair, rustling the leaves. But that wasn't a date.

Still, he was the reason she'd taken a shower before she left this morning, combed the knots out of her shoulder-length black hair, and put on her favorite pair of jeans and a blue shirt with just the right amount of lace (very little). She knew she wasn't ugly, but she wasn't stunning, either. Rose was sure that if there was any greatness in her at all, it lurked somewhere inside of her and not on her face.

Her mother seemed to agree. “You're not like other girls,” she'd once said. “You're so good at math!”

As Rose wondered why she couldn't be both—the kind of girl who was good at math
and
pretty—she and Sage left the shop, poppies in hand.

3. Poplar's Open-Air Market. 2 lbs. pippin apples
.

A short burst of ferocious pedaling carried them over the train tracks to Poplar's Open-Air Market, which was so crowded in the early morning that the lanes between the rows of fruit and vegetable stands were like a parkway during a traffic jam.

“I need apples!” yelled Rose, waving one hand in the air.

“Aisle three!” a man yelled from behind a table stacked higher than his head with peaches.

Sage stopped the flow of traffic by picking up two giant butternut squashes and lifting them like dumbbells.

“Why are you doing that?”

“I'm getting strong—like Ty,” he puffed, his face turning beet red. “Ty and I are going to be pro athletes. There's no way I'm going to stay here and bake for the rest of my life.”

Rose grabbed the butternut squashes from Sage's outstretched arms and put them back where they belonged. “But we help people,” Rose whispered to Sage. “We're like good baker wizards.”

“If we're wizards, then where are our wands and our owls and magic hats? And where is our arch-nemesis?” Sage said. “Face it, Sis—we're just bakers. While you're stuck here making cakes, me and Ty will be modeling sneakers in France.”

Sage pedaled off and Rose was left holding the apples, her arms trembling under the weight.

4. Mr. Kline's Key Shop. You know what to do
.

In a rusty shack on the outskirts of town, Rose handed Mr. Kline the delicate whisk-shaped key. He examined it through glasses as thick as English muffins.

The key shop was windowless, and everything in it was covered in a fine layer of gray dust, as if Mr. Kline had just come back from a very long vacation. Rose breathed in through her mouth. The air tasted like metal.