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
