Bliss

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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.

At dinnertime, Mrs Carlson was dismayed to find the family sitting Indian-style on a quilt in the backyard, Chip and Lily carving a leg of lamb the size of an air conditioner.

“So. What strange thing will we eat for dinner tonight? Curry?” she spat.

“No, ma’am!” Sage cooed. “This is a leg of lamb with that zeekee!”

“Tzatziki,” Lily corrected, laughing. “It’s a Greek yogurt sauce.”

Leigh sat on Chip’s lap and gnawed on the same piece of lamb for a long time, Sage and Ty wiped the juicy yogurt sauce from their mouths with their sleeves, and Mrs Carlson could barely contain a smile as she sucked down pieces of lamb, which were tender as butter. All the while, Rose stared in disbelief at her aunt, who in less than two days had transformed the knitted brows of the Bliss clan into easy smiles.

Leigh lifted the Polaroid camera that was permanently strapped to her neck and snapped a picture of Aunt Lily.

After everyone had finished their lamb, Lily sneaked off into the kitchen and reappeared carrying a shallow tart with a pale crumb crust, filled with yellow custard. “I made you all something wonderful for dessert!”

Rose’s face fell. She hated lemon tarts.

So did Sage. “Ech! Lemon!” he winced, puckering his mouth like a fish.

“No, no!” Lily cried. “There’s no lemon! I absolutely detest lemon tarts! No, I guarantee that this is unlike anything you’ve tried before!” she said, doling out slivers with a long knife. “This is a recipe from my great-great-great-grandfather Albatross.”

Rose looked at the slice on her plate. Only the top layer was yellow custard – beneath it were layers of swirling crimson and blue and even something that shimmered like the skin of a fish. When she bit into it, she tasted thick, buttery goop that was sweet and a little salty and, indeed, unlike anything she’d ever had.

The Bliss bunch sat in silence, nibbling on tiny bites of the sublime tart, trying to make it last all night.

“See, this is the sort of special recipe I’ve been travelling around trying to collect,” Lily explained. “Truly unique recipes.”

The phone rang from inside the kitchen, but everyone was too engrossed in the tart to notice – even Mrs Carlson, who sat quietly nibbling, a look of rapture on her face.

Only Leigh, who lost interest in the tart after one nibble, ran into the kitchen and stood on one of the red leather cushions in the booth to answer the old black rotary phone. She called from inside, “Mama is on the phone. Ty, talk to Mama!” She left the receiver dangling from the wall in the kitchen and ran outside to rejoin the group on the picnic blanket.

Ty grumbled and stood up.

Lily grabbed his wrist. “Finish that last bite, Ty – I don’t want any to go to waste!”

Ty grinned at the look of Aunt Lily’s long, elegant fingers wrapped round his wrist, and, like an obedient dog, popped the remaining chunk of the tart in his mouth and swallowed in one gulp, then paced to the back door, as if in a trance. He found the phone swinging on the cord and listlessly pressed it to his ear.

Rose could hear him speak in the way he always spoke on the phone – mechanical, almost robotic. “Hi… Good… No, nothing new has happened.”

Which wasn’t true at all! Aunt Lily had arrived, which was possibly the newest thing that had ever happened in the entire dull history of Calamity Falls.

Rose had the urge to run to the phone and tell her parents all about Aunt Lily, to make sure that she’d done the right thing by letting her into the family business. She told herself she was going to do so, right after this next bite of tart. And then the next bite. And, really, right after she finished cleaning her plate. She just couldn’t stop nibbling on the tart. Not even after Ty hung up and sat down in the backyard again, saying, “Oh, it was just the usual – clean up and go to bed early and blah blah blah.”

Aunt Lily silenced him by raising a forkful of tart towards his mouth. And then they all quieted and ate in silence until every plate and utensil was licked clean and every crumb of the tart was gone, as if it had never been there in the first place.

Every night before bed, the four Bliss children gathered upstairs in the little bathroom with the green floral wallpaper for a sacred ritual they called Brush Time. The foursome huddled round the tiny white porcelain sink in their flannel pyjamas and brushed their teeth together.

Ty stumbled around the bathroom in his one pair of blue lacrosse shorts, shirtless, listlessly dragging the bristles over his tongue. Leigh sort of smeared her mouth with toothpaste and then spat. Only Rose brushed her teeth as they were supposed to do: from the gumline to the tips, twice round, inside and out.

Sage sat on the little rocking chair next to the claw-foot tub with his arms folded across his chest, pouting.

“What’s wrong now, Sage?” grumbled Rose as she helped Leigh wipe toothpaste from her lips, nose and face. But she already knew. He, like the rest of them, was thinking about their “aunt” Lily, who even now was settling into the guest room in the basement.

“Why can’t we show Lily the book? She needs recipes for her show! Then when she gets famous, we can visit her and be famous too!”

Ty spat into the sink with gusto. “I’m with Little Bro on this one. She needs our help. I think she would love… us if we gave it to her.”

Lily’s words rang in Rose’s brain: You have gifts too, Rose… It’s just a matter of what you choose to do with them. She looked down at the whisk-shaped key that hung round her neck. “We can’t do it. I promised.”

“Fine!” shouted Sage. “So just ’cause you’re afraid of Mum and Dad and have to do everything they say, Aunt Lily suffers? Good, kind, wonderful Aunt Lily? Who made us paella and helped out in the bakery all day and made us a special dessert that was better than anything Mum and Dad ever made from that stupid cookbook?”

“But we don’t even know her!” Rose cried. Why was her desire to do the correct and responsible thing always met with frowns from her brothers?

Then Rose thought of something – what if she could help Lily and herself in one fell swoop? What if, instead of showing Lily the book, Rose could copy some of the recipes and practise them right under Lily’s nose? Then, if they still trusted Aunt Lily at the end of the week, they could show her the recipes. That way Rose herself would get to learn a little magic and maybe show her brothers that she wasn’t all rules and business. Then maybe she’d tell her mother about it, years later, over a cup of tea, and her mother would laugh and say, Oh, Rose, what a take-charge kind of person you are! I think you and I should run the bakery together.

Rose beamed at the thought. “I guess it would be all right,” she began, “to just copy a few of the recipes out of the book and learn them ourselves; then we can teach them to her at the end of the week. That way she’ll just think it’s a regular recipe with a few weird ingredients. But she can’t know about the book!”

Sage and Ty nodded, smiling. “Lily’s gonna love this,” Ty said.

“OK,” Rose said, putting her toothbrush away, and then Leigh’s. “Let’s meet in the back of the fridge tomorrow morning before she wakes up and copy some recipes.”

The brothers Bliss gave each other a high five, then patted Rose on the back. And for the first time in a while, she felt like they had all come from the same parents.

“For the record, I have a bad feeling about this,” Rose said, but Ty and Sage were too busy doing a victory dance to hear. She picked Leigh up in her arms like a baby and plopped her on to her bed. Rose pulled the soft red jersey sheets up to her little sister’s chin and tucked them under. “Do you think I’m making a mistake, Leigh?”

But Leigh was already asleep.

VERY EARLY THE next morning, Rose tiptoed down the stairs and into the kitchen, still in her nightgown. She had a tiny bad feeling about this whole plan, but a huge thrilled feeling about using the cookbook and being part of a team with her brothers, so that won out.

The sky outside was a pale grey, and little rivers of rain inched their way down the windows, blurring the lines of the backyard. Rose could barely make out the dark form of Aunt Lily’s motorcycle sitting in the driveway. Leigh was still asleep in her bed, and as Rose crept down the stairs, she had been able to hear Mrs Carlson snoring mightily. All was quiet from the basement, so it seemed that Lily was asleep as well.

Ty was crammed into the booth, still wearing his blue lacrosse shorts, a white tank top and a lime-green walkie-talkie headset that he’d got for his birthday a few years before.

“Welcome, Rosemary,” he said, motioning for her to sit. “You’re right on schedule.” He pressed a button on the headset and spoke into the microphone. “Coriander, come in. Come in, Coriander.”