Bliss by Kathryn Littlewood Read Free Book Online Page A

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 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 grayish tower that came to two peaks on either side of her head, like the ears of a wolf.
    â€œThat’s Miss Thistle, my biology teacher. 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?”
    â€œOne day, Mr. Bastable came to our biology class to show us a slide show 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 around 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 rivaled 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 mom would have been cooking from something more … special.”
    â€œNope, this is it,” Rose said nervously. “Ordinary recipes. My mom 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 anymore, 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