Читать книгу Rose Bliss Cooks up Magic - Kathryn Littlewood - Страница 7

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.

“We don’t actually know that, Balthazar,” Albert protested, though Rose thought he looked more like he was trying to convince himself than Balthazar. Rose’s great-great-great-grandfather just harrumphed.

“Never mind any of that!” Ty shouted. “The solution to our problems is so obvious! All Rose has to do is one commercial for Kathy Keegan Snack Kakes, and we can all retire to Tahiti. None of us will have to approach an oven again. They’ll be baking for us!” He and Sage gave each other a high five.

“It’s not about the money, Thyme,” Purdy said, flicking her oldest son on the side of his head. “It’s about the people of this town. They need us. And we need them. Baking is our grand purpose.”

“Besides,” said her father, “we can afford it – for now. We’ve always scrimped and saved in case of an emergency. And this? This is as much an emergency as Calamity Falls has ever faced.”

Somewhere deep within her, Rose felt a tiny flame kindle, a fire of hope and a desire to do some good the only way she knew how. “What are we going to do?” she asked her mum.

Purdy smiled, and Rose felt the dreariness of the past twenty-seven days burn away like a cloud at sunrise. “We are now the Bliss Bakery Underground,” Purdy announced. “We will bake all day and all night, and beginning tomorrow morning, we will personally deliver the cakes and pies and muffins to everyone in town. The people of Calamity Falls stuck with us through our hard times, when we didn’t have the Booke. Now we’re going to stick by them.”

Albert tore the official government letter dramatically down the center. “I think that’s the best idea I’ve ever heard.”

Purdy moved Leigh to her father’s lap. She stood up and began pacing the cramped bakery kitchen. “Chip will make a major grocery store run,” Purdy said, looking at her burly assistant. “Albert – will you inventory our magical ingredients?” Standing tall, she added, “We shall not cease.”

“I’ll help,” Rose said, happy for the opportunity to reverse her careless wish and, for the first time in nearly a month, to cut loose and bake – no cameras, no reporters, just three generations of Blisses, doing what they had always done best.

Making kitchen magic.

It was three in the morning.

The heat in the kitchen was as thick as grape jelly. Rose cracked the red egg of a masked lovebird into a bowl of zucchini muffin batter to make a batch of Love Muffins for Mr and Mrs Bastable-Thistle, who, without the magical intervention of the Bliss Bakery, became shy strangers to each other.

“Mum, look,” Rose said as she mixed in the egg, watching the batter thicken and hiss as tiny hearts of flour exploded into the air.

But Purdy couldn’t hear Rose – not over the Malaysian Toucan of Fortune, whose confident squawk she released into a bowlful of pastry cream, then stuffed the cream into a batch of Choral Cream Puffs for the Calamity Falls Community Chorus, whose voices were meek and thin without them. “What was that, honey?” Purdy asked.

“Never mind,” Rose said, continuing with the muffin batter as Balthazar unleashed the gaze of a medieval Third Eye onto a batch of Father-Daughter Fudge for Mr Borzini and his daughter, Lindsey – after eating the fudge, each could more easily glimpse where the other was coming from. “You never want to look a Third Eye directly in its, erm, eye,” Balthazar told Rose. “It could blind you.”

Mental note, Rose thought. Don’t go blind.

The family had been at it for sixteen hours, and Purdy’s master list of baked goods was still only half complete.

The kitchen itself was strewn with blue mason jars filled with various sniffs and snorts and fairies and gnomes and ancient lizards and talking mushrooms and googly eyes and woogly flies and jittering, glowing bobbles of every sort. Hints of cinnamon and nutmeg and vanilla swirled in the air, and all the various sounds coming from the kitchen made Rose hope the neighbours wouldn’t think the Blisses were running a zoo.

Albert had ferried jar after jar of magical ingredients from the secret cellar beneath the walk-in fridge – “Watch your heads, Blisses!” – until the dingy wooden shelves were practically empty.

Ty and Sage had long since gone to bed. At one point, they’d come downstairs for a snack, but they took one look at the magical mayhem, at the chomping teeth and flying rabbits and the explosions of colour coming from dozens of metal mixing bowls, then scurried back upstairs.

There were Cookies of Truth for the infamous fibber Mrs Havegood, Calm-Down-Crepes for the angry, overwrought Scottish babysitter Mrs Carlson, and Adventurous-Apple-Turnovers for the reserved League of Lady Librarians.

There was Seeing-Eye Shortbread for Florence the Florist, who was nearly blind, Frugal Framboise Cake for the French restaurateur Pierre Guillaume, who had a notorious shopping problem, and even something for Devin Stetson, the blond boy whom Rose had thought about at least twice a day for approximately one year, five months, and eleven days. She had made him Breathe-Easy Sticky Buns to help with his frequent sinus infections, which, as far as Rose was concerned, were the only things wrong with Devin Stetson.

By four a.m., Rose felt that the heat from the ovens was slapping her on the head. She told Purdy she needed to lie down just for a minute, and she nuzzled onto the bench at the breakfast table and promptly fell asleep.

Rose woke to bright buttery sunshine and the swatting and drooling of Gus the Scottish Fold cat. “Deliveries, Rose!” he said, batting her on the shoulder with his thick paw. “The list is complete!”

Rose bolted upright and found her mother, father, and Balthazar snoring on the floor. Every surface of the kitchen was covered in white bakery boxes tied with red-and-white-striped twine.

Ty and Sage had already started loading boxes into the back of the Bliss family van. Leigh helped by sitting beside the boxes and patting them with her frosting-covered hands. “Pat-a-cake,” she said over and over again.

Sage strapped her into her car seat and climbed in beside her.

“I’m driving,” Ty said proudly. He was fond of reminding everyone that at sixteen he was old enough to drive, and now he reached into the back pocket of his dark jeans and pulled out his licence. The picture on the front captured the full height of his red spiky hair, though it cut off everything below his top lip. “Phew,” he said. “Just making sure I had my licence. My driver’s licence.”

Rose rolled her eyes.

“Let’s go, hermana,” he said. “I’ll drive.”

“Actually, I think I’m going to make a few personal deliveries on my bike, if that’s OK,” Rose said.

Ty looked at her sideways, then shrugged. “Whatever hermana wants, hermana gets.” Ever since Ty had taken Spanish in school, he added foreign words to what he said in an effort to sound foreign and sophisticated.

Sage called out through the van’s window. “You do know there’s no air-conditioning on a bike, right?”

“I know,” said Rose. While her brothers waited, she rifled through the back of the van and grabbed a few choice boxes. She loaded them in the front basket of her bike and carefully put one special box into her backpack. Just as she was about to set off, Gus hopped inside the basket, too.

“Onward!” he cried.

“Do stop at the Reginald Calamity Fountain, sweet Rose, so that I can catch myself some breakfast.”

The fuzzy grey blob of Gus’s head peeked out from Rose’s basket as she pedalled through the streets.

“Gus, there are no fish in the fountain,” Rose answered, “only nickels and dimes that people throw in there for good luck. It’s a tradition.”

“Well, then, I shall collect those nickels and dimes and buy myself some delectable smoked fish.”

Without stopping at the fountain, Rose parked her bike in front of the ivy-covered bungalow owned by Mr and Mrs Bastable-Thistle.

“No talking, Gus,” she said, opening her backpack.

Gus leaped inside, wiggled around until he was comfortable, then poked his head out. “Oh, I know.” He sighed. “If only the sight of a talking cat didn’t cause such violent fainting among humans.”

Rose pulled aside a tapestry of ivy and pressed her finger into the doorbell, which was shaped like a frog.

After a moment, Mr Bastable, wearing a frog-printed T-shirt that read KISS ME, answered the door. “Hello, Rose,” he said. He seemed a bit droopy, though his stringy white hair was as wild as ever. “What brings you here?”

Rose stared at the welcome mat, which said FROGS AND CERTAIN HUMANS WELCOME. “As you know, the Bliss Bakery has been closed,” she said. “But we wanted to say thank you for supporting us while we were away at the Gala, so we brought you some of your favourite Love – I mean, zucchini muffins.”

“My my,” he said quietly. Rose could tell by the soft twinkle in his eye that he was touched, but Mr Bastable had always been shy, hence the need for Love Muffins.

Mr Bastable noticed Gus’s folded ears peeking out from Rose’s backpack. “Hey, is that a cat? What’s wrong with its ears?”

Rose felt Gus’s body tense inside her backpack.

“Oh, nothing! He’s a breed called a Scottish Fold. They just have folded ears.”

“Huh,” Mr Bastable mused, biting absentmindedly into one of the Love Muffins. “Somewhat like the ear of a frog, all folded up on its face.”

Gus dug his claws into Rose’s back. “Ow!” She jumped.

“What?” Mr Bastable said.

“Nothing,” said Rose.

Ignoring her, Mr Bastable took another crumbly bite and swallowed loudly. Suddenly, his eyes flashed a bright green, his back straightened, and he cleared his throat. “Felidia!” he shouted. “I must woo my beloved Felidia once more, for she is a supreme woman, and supreme women must be wooed daily! I’m coming, Felidia!”

Then Mr Bastable turned away, the box of muffins tucked under his arm. He slammed the door in Rose’s face.

“I guess it worked,” Rose said, though she didn’t want to think about what was about to transpire inside the Bastable-Thistle bungalow.

“Ears like a frog,” said Gus. “Of all the ridiculous nonsense.”

Florence the Florist thought that Rose was a burglar until she took a bite out of a piece of Seeing-Eye Shortbread. “Ah! Rose Bliss!” she cried out, and sighed with relief that the Blisses hadn’t forgotten about her.

Rose caught Pierre Guillaume on his day off. “Sacré bleu!” he cried as he took a bite of Frugal Framboise Cake, which promptly dissuaded him from buying a yacht on eBay. “That mother of yours, Purdy, she eez always looking out for me,” he said.

Box by box, Rose went around town, narrowly averting small disasters, until just one box remained: the one in her backpack, the one she’d really wanted to deliver, for which all the others had been only an excuse.

She pedalled up the impossible incline of Sparrow Hill and parked her bike in front of Stetson’s Doughnuts and Automotive Repair.

Rose wondered whether Devin had seen her new haircut. She had got what the hairdresser called “side bangs,” which meant that her black bangs now sloped down from one end of her forehead to the other, instead of the usual straight line that she gave herself in the bathroom mirror. Rose hadn’t said a word to Devin in school, but she thought that maybe he’d seen her bangs in the paper, or in a TV news report. She hated to admit how much the side bangs made her feel like a sophisticated woman, but she couldn’t help it. They just did.

Walking in a sophisticated manner, Rose wandered into the store carrying the box of Breathe-Easy Sticky Buns. They were gooey pillows of sweet dough covered in sticky cinnamon frosting. In the very centre of each was a dollop of crème infused with Arctic Wind – the buns instantaneously cleared the lungs and sinuses of any unwanted goop. Purdy used to make them for Rose when she was home sick from school with a stuffy nose, and they were far more fun to eat than chicken soup.

Rose spotted Devin behind the checkout counter. He sported side bangs of his own, only his were a rich, sandy blond. To her they looked like spun gold. His nostrils were bright red and his eyes were clouded and dull. He blew his nose into a tissue.

“He looks like a sickly version of that Justin Boo Boo character,” Gus whispered from his perch in the backpack.

“Shush!” she hissed, gliding over to the checkout counter.

She gathered herself and took a deep breath. “Hi, Devin.”

Devin quickly wiped his nose, then smoothed his bangs. “Hi, Rose,” he replied gloomily.

“Are you OK?” Rose asked. “Sick again?”

“Yeah, you doh me,” he said, sniffling. He nervously drummed his fingers on the glass countertop. “You’re, like, this celebrity dow. It’s weird.”

Rose’s heart sank. “Bad weird, or good weird?”

Devin stumbled over his words. “Good weird. Oh, defidently good weird. I … uh …” He trailed off. His eyes darted between her face and an empty corner of the ceiling.

Is he nervous? Rose thought. I’m usually the nervous one. Aloud, she said, “I came because even though the bakery is closed, I wanted to bring you your favourite – Sticky Buns! So you’re not forlorn without them.”

Rose nearly kicked herself as the words left her mouth. Forlorn? Why did she say that? She sounded like a ninety-year-old granny. Devin probably thought she was a word-obsessed moron.

Devin opened the box and sank his teeth into one of the thick, pillowy buns. “Mmmmmmmmm!” he exclaimed. “My oh my, that is one gnarly bun.” The m’s and n’s came out crystal clear. “Weird! I can breathe again!” He smiled, and his eyes lost their sleepy look.

“Good weird or bad weird?” Rose teased.

“Good weird,” he replied, smiling.

Back outside, Gus whispered, “He’s not even that cute,” as Rose skipped toward her bike, her feet so light that she felt like she might be receiving assistance from unseen fairies.

“Says you.” Rose squealed, already replaying the moment in her mind like a beloved DVD.

“The basket of your bike is decidedly uncomfortable for travel,” Gus observed, squinting up at the empty wire basket. “And cold. The wind, you know.”

“Would you like to ride in my backpack?” Rose said.

“I thought you’d never ask.”

She knelt down and opened the flap, and Gus leaped inside. From the dark, she could hear him moving around and saying, “Much warmer! This is more like it!”

She reshouldered the pack and had very nearly reached her bike when a voice called out to her from the lookout fence at the top of the hill.

“Are you Rose Bliss?”

Rose turned and saw a hulking figure silhouetted against the afternoon sky. The only person she’d ever seen with such enormous shoulders was Chip – but this man sure didn’t sound like Chip. She moved closer.

“You’re Rose Bliss, aren’t you?” he repeated in a deep, gravelly voice.

The man had a nice-looking face – at least for someone almost as old as her dad – rugged, with a huge head, a square jaw, and narrow, beady eyes. He had thick black hair and wore a track suit made of fuzzy maroon velour. His fingers and the front of his track suit seemed to be covered with a light dusting of flour.

“I don’t like this,” Gus whispered. “What’s that on his fingers? What sort of grown man wears a maroon velour track suit?”

Rose’s parents had always told her not to talk to strangers, but ever since she’d won the Gala des Gâteaux Grands, everyone knew who she was. There was no real point in denying it. “Yes, I’m Rose Bliss.”

“I thought so.” The man gestured over the tranquil pastures of Calamity Falls. “You know what’s a travesty, Rose? The new bakery law.”

Rose softened a bit. “Yeah, it makes no sense.”

“Those people out there,” the man went on, sounding passionate, “they need cake and pie and cookies and doughnuts. Just a little sweet thing once in a while reminds a person of how sweet life is.” He rested his hand on his chest, like someone about to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

Rose nodded. She thought of the lives she had brightened this morning. The people she and her family had helped. But how long would they be able to keep it up? The Blisses had provided enough magic that morning to last the town a couple of days, but they couldn’t really go on baking and delivering everything to people’s homes without being paid. They weren’t broke, not yet, but they couldn’t support the whole town.

“A life without the occasional slice of cake is … it’s an empty life,” he continued, inching closer. “Look out there,” he said, gesturing again at Calamity Falls. “Emptiness. That’s what’s going to become of all those lives.”

Gus reached a paw out of the backpack and swatted Rose’s ear. “I don’t like this!” he whispered.

The strange behemoth of a man bent over so they were eye to eye. “Would you … I mean, do you want to help those people?”

“Of course!” Rose said. She thought of the wish she’d made. She didn’t really believe what the cat had told her (did she?). A wish couldn’t change the world (could it?). But even so, she would take it back if she could. “It’s what I want most in the world.”

“Oh good!” said the man. “In that case …”

He snapped his fingers.

Before Rose could take a deep breath to scream, darkness closed over her and Gus as they were enveloped in a giant empty flour sack.