Chapter 1: Cookies & Spice
The girl in the green cardigan with the rolling cart makes her way down the main street in the village of Durbin. This is the Durbin of the out-of-the-way, of where Starbucks is unlikely to penetrate, a place pleasantly apart. Down the street she rolls, looking this way and that for where hope rests, a gathering expectation in the form of the Bella Rosa Bakery, a name that somehow struck her fancy. On the East side of the square her friend told her, just after she was forced to gently evict her, no longer having room for what is almost a vagrant girl, down now to her last few twenties. The girl, a baker of beautiful cookies, luxurious in their swirls and colors and in the overall heavenliness of their taste, has a talent that can sustain her, if only she can find a place to bake and hungry people to buy her cookies. In the cart, a book of glossy pictures show the work of her thin nibble fingers--the shiny-eyed wonder of her youth and imagination: Will anyone believe these pictures--what this slender, rosey-haired woman--still a girl really--all curls and freckles, radiant with hope and unquenchable enthusiasm, can do?
The little sign, a wood carving of a fat loaf of bread over which the words Bella Rosa curve, is hard to see nestled in the shade of a big red maple growing by the curb. She first sees the three or four small tables tucked in the niche of a storefront where two windows of gleaming glass angle inward to frame a green door in their center. Looking up, there is the sign, here is the bakery, dappled in shade, on this sunny auspicious morning in the first days of autumn: A big breath, a straightening of strong, slender shoulders, and in she goes.
"Hello!" She is greeted by a young woman and a skinny teenage girl, both grinning, standing side by side, looking at her expectantly. They saw her on their street, looking this way and that, rolling her cart, intent. Nellie thought vaguely of someone familiar; her niece Madeleine, of a long lost friend, although she would never have used those words for such a whimsical notion so quickly forgotten, just a fleeting wisp of something, a whisper in the wind.
"Hi!" the girl says, all smiles.
The teen runs over to her. "What a neat cart! The wheels are so cool!"
"I painted them myself, this is my little really 'green' car."
"What's in the cart?" the teen asks. By now the woman has joined them so that the three of them are standing together, comfortably, if not unaccountably, chatting like new found friends.
(How do strangers instantly know, just so, that there is to their meeting a destiny true, a place from which in hazy profile, by a tide true, where selves float back then forward into this real life, like these three souls chatting amicably, warmed by sun beaming through the shiny window of the Bella Rosa Bakery?)
"Come sit down!" The woman says, taking the girl's hand. "I'm Nellie--this is my niece, Snooky" and grins, "her real name is Madeleine."
"I was named after the cat I used to chase in the back by the storeroom." Snooky says and takes her other hand, leading her to a table by the window, where they sit.
The teen peaks into the cart. Nellie laughs, "Nosey!"
"My name is Janie, Janie Irving." The girl says and in playful formality shakes the teen's hand. "Want to see my cookies?'
"Cookies?" Nellie says, interested, as always, in all things baked. "I tried to make cookies--not too well, I'm afraid. They look so easy, but my brother, heartless bastard" she points her head to the back of the bakery, "never approved."
"Oh," says Janie, her shoulders unconsciously drooping, "too bad."
"I'm just not such a good cook--he isn't really heartless--or a bastard," she giggles.
Snooky has already dipped into the cart and is holding a red photo album, on whose cover, in a flourish of hand painted script curves, "Cookies to Die For."
"Snooky..." Nellie says.
"Let me show you!" Janie says. She takes the book from Snooky and opens it onto the table. The three of them gather around it, heads close. On the first page, row after decorated row of perfect cookies present themselves. On the next few pages, closeups show the beautiful detail of delicious looking cookies: corkscrews, swirls, towers, buttons, and bows, all of an original, if not, whimsical design. They are bathed in bright colors, a rainbow of cookies of all shapes and sizes, little works of art.
"I love cookies," Nellie says, wistfully, "If only I could make them better..."
"Nice designs!" A baritone voice says from over Nellie's shoulder. "Did you make those?"
"Yes!" Janie says, "It's my specialty!"
"You bake cookies..." Snooky says, her eyes flitting from Nellie to the baritone.
"Yep--all these, for a few years now." Janie says.
"Where do you work?" asks Nellie.
"I'd like to work here." Janie says simply, laying it on the line, heart aflutter.
"Oh, good!" says Snooky, wrapping Janie in an unabashed hug.
"Hmm," says the baritone as Nellie adds an encouraging smile, turning her head to the man behind her who now takes a seat at the table opposite them, his eyes moving between the pictures and the girl. Janie turns the book in his direction.
"So you bake," he says, as she narrates what the cookies are made of, how they are made, and what some of their unique ingredients are, including this secret ingredient and that, her phrasing very clearly a baker's shorthand that causes the man to smile.
"I'm Roscoe," he says, "and this" his eyes rest playfully on his sister, Nellie, and Snooky, his daughter, whom he introduces, ending with a wave that captures the room "and this is the family bakery."
"May I bake my cookies here?" Janie asks, holding her breathe.
Snooky takes her hand and squeezes it, big eyes looking up at her father. And Nellie puts a possessive arm around Janie's shoulder, "Cookies would go well with the coffee...'
Roscoe, liking the girl's spunkiness, is well aware of just how insistent his daughter and sister can be when they dig in, decides on compromise, "We can't eat a picture! Bake us some samples...but no promises."
"Right now?" asks Janie, excitedly, her mind already whirling through her favorite recipes.
"Why not, the bakings done for today and the ovens are still warm. Maybe Sis can show you were everything is." Roscoe says.
