by Anna Meriano
“What do you mean?” Caroline asked.
“My sisters and mom and aunt are supposed to be working. Mamá had a lot to get ready, and she needed more help to serve the customers and handle the extra baking.” Leo repeated the words Mamá had used to shut down her argument all week. “But it’s not even open.”
Caroline leaned next to Leo and peered out the window too. “Secrets,” she said softly.
The bakery slid backward until it slipped out of both their sights.
Leo’s heart pounded so hard, she thought it might leap out of her chest. Her mind raced with a thousand possibilities while Caroline chewed on her fingernail.
The bus pulled in front of the school. Everyone rushed out of their seats. Rose Hill Elementary and Rose Hill Middle School shared the same building, and Leo usually felt a surge of superiority when she got off the bus and left behind the K-through-five kids. But today she just felt small and frustrated.
The bell rang. Leo led Caroline toward the sixth-grade classroom, where Ms. Wood, their tall brown-skinned teacher, welcomed Caroline with a packet of rules and a warm smile. Leo helped Caroline settle into the desk next to hers, which had been empty all year waiting for her.
She sat at her desk and doodled in a notebook as the rest of the class shuffled in—goblins and wizards and cats and other witches too, though Leo thought her costume was the best. Later, there would be a parade leading to the gym, where teachers set up booths with Halloween “assignments” like crossword puzzles and ghost-themed math worksheets. Leo usually spent the day collecting candy from the booths with the easiest work and then sitting on the rickety metal bleachers with Alma and Belén, waiting for the costume contest to start. There would be no twins today, though, and Leo wasn’t in the mood for crossword puzzles.
A plan started to rise like dough inside Leo.
“Caroline,” Leo whispered urgently while Ms. Wood pushed back her fake-nose-and-mustache glasses and continued to take attendance. “Can you do me a favor?”
“What?”
Ms. Wood finished calling roll and put her clipboard on her desk. Leo’s fingers twitched.
“My family is up to something, and I have to find out what. I need to get to the bakery and investigate. And I thought, since the parade is always so wild, and Ms. Wood won’t be counting us once we get to the gym . . .”
Caroline’s eyes went wide. “Are you thinking of skipping class?”
“Not class,” Leo whispered. “Just the party. I’ll probably get caught unless someone covers for me and tells Ms. Wood that they saw me, or that I just went to the bathroom.”
Caroline’s forehead creased. Leo knew she was asking a lot—it was Caroline’s first day back, and a good friend should probably stay to support her. Ms. Wood clapped her hands, and the sixth graders started to line up for the parade. Leo shook her head, stomping down her disappointment. “Never mind,” she said. “You don’t have to. It was a bad idea anyway.”
But Caroline lifted her wand and tapped the top of Leo’s black hat. “No, I can do it. Just make sure you line up next to Victoria.”
“Huh?” Leo looked around, and then she saw that Victoria Goldman was one of the other wicked witches, with dark frizzy hair hanging over her green face and a pointy black hat. “Oh, smart.” Leo slipped into line behind Victoria. It was nice to have Caroline back.
After Ms. Wood led the class out into the hallway, Leo ducked behind the water fountain and then into the bathroom. She stood behind the door of the first stall, listening to her heart pound over the sounds of various classes filing toward the gym.
About ten minutes later, the hallway finally got quiet. Leo ran out of the bathroom, down the hall, and into the street in front of the school, her witch hat clutched to her chest and her shoulders hunched to avoid being spotted.
When she turned the corner safely onto Main, she unhunched her shoulders and looked around. Main Street buildings crowded together, forming a wall of colorful storefronts interrupted only by a parking lot and a gas station at the end of the road near the freeway.
Leo put her hat back on her head and rushed down the sidewalk, past window displays of jack-o’-lanterns and skeletons, hoping no one would notice a little witch with a smudged green face scurrying toward Amor y Azúcar Panadería.
CHAPTER 3
CANDLES, RIBBONS, AND BREAD
On a normal day, Tía Paloma opened the bakery at seven a.m. sharp, after two hours of preparing the kitchen and baking up the first batches of pan dulce. But from two blocks away, Leo could smell that today was different. The air was crisp and cool, with no warm yeasty scent covering the gravel-and-gas smell of the road. When she reached the bakery, its bright wooden door held a chalkboard sign that announced Please be patient! We’re closed today in preparation for Día de los Muertos. Come out tomorrow at nine a.m. for games, traditions, and lots of food! Underneath that, in smaller letters, the sign added For special orders and emergencies, just call us!
Leo stood to one side of the door, so that anyone inside the bakery couldn’t see her through the big shelf of colorful skulls and cakes set up in the display window. She heard a car speed down the highway, cheerful pigeons squawking, but not the voices of her family. She tiptoed around to the back of the building and peeked inside the back door to make sure she wasn’t about to crash straight into her tía or her mamá. No one was inside.
She pulled the door open. Mamá got on the phone at least once a week to fuss at Tía Paloma about leaving the back door unlocked, but it never did any good.
“Hello?” Leo whispered into the silent bakery. No one answered.
The story about the busy day? It was all a lie.
Leo slammed the door shut and pressed her back against it. She slid down to the ground and buried her green face in her knees. She was so mad her makeup was melting, tears cutting green streaks down her cheeks. Half worried from Caroline’s talk about secrets, half furious that she was being left out again, Leo felt her bad feelings swell like cake in an oven. Before she knew it, Leo let out a loud screech, one that would have sent Señor Gato running.
“What was that noise?” someone said.
Leo panicked as she heard voices over the spine-tingling crunch of gravel. She peered out the back window and saw Mamá’s muddy maroon car parked in the no longer empty lot. Doors slammed, and Leo’s sisters and Mamá piled out.
“Why couldn’t I have just gone to school?” she heard Marisol complain.
A lightning bolt of panic zipped through Leo. Mamá would be boiling-oil mad if she found out that Leo had left school without permission. Leo darted away from the door, looking for a place to hide.
She raced past the walk-in refrigerator, where trays of shaped dough, gallons of milk, and crates of eggs waited to be freed from their cling-wrapped stacks. She darted past the long wooden table that took up the center of the kitchen area, spotless and empty, when it was usually covered in piles of flour, hunks of dough, and jars of fruit filling, frosting, and caramel. Leo shot by Mamá and Daddy’s empty office, almost crashed into the swinging doors that led to the front of the bakery, and leaned against them to catch her breath when she heard Mamá calling for help emptying the trunk of the car.
She gazed around, looking for a place to hide as the voices in the parking lot grew louder. She backed up and slammed into the cabinets. They stood tall and solid, three of them lined along the walls of the kitchen. Unlike the modern metal ovens or the smooth countertop, the cabinets were carved and cracked, worn down in a way that nothing else in the kitchen was. But right now, as someone struggled with locking and then unlocking the already open back door, the most important thing about the cabinets was that they were big.
Leo pulled open the doors of the first cabinet, crawled onto the bottom shelf between two huge sacks of flour, and shut herself in until only a thin line of light showed where the doors didn’t fit together perfectly. She gazed through the crack, able to see half of the bakery kitchen.
High-hee
led shoes click-clacked on the orange-brown tiles. Leo tried to lean closer to the crack without making the old shelf creak. She could almost see something—the very edge of a hand and a dark skirt.
“Hello? Yes, I’m here. Where are you?” Mamá wasn’t using her customer voice, so it was probably Tía Paloma on the phone, or Daddy. Leo leaned so her ear was pressed against the crack.
“Yes, I have the ribbon. The candles are at your house. No, you took them last time because you said you needed them. I told you we should keep them together, but you said— I’m sure. I’m sure, Palomita. Yes, I— Okay, it’s okay. Marisol and I can make them. Just get over here. We’re waiting. And don’t forget to bring Mamá and Abuelita.”
Bring Mamá and Abuelita? Leo shook her head. She must’ve gotten flour in her ears. Abuela had passed away when Leo was only a toddler, and Mamá’s grandmother had been dead for much longer.
Mamá snapped her phone case shut, click-clacked her way to the front of the bakery. Leo heard snippets of her sisters arguing.
Leo thumped back to lean against a flour sack. Her brain felt like a stuffed empanada, with Mamá’s words oozing out the sides like guava jelly. Candles? Ribbons? Those were hardly normal baking ingredients. Leo didn’t know what her Mamá had planned, but it definitely felt bigger than getting ready for tomorrow’s festival.
After a few minutes, she heard noise in the back of the bakery again. The door opened and closed. She leaned forward to take a look through the crack in the cabinet door and spotted Tía Paloma.
“Start the dough, Isa,” Mamá said. “We need to set the table.”
“Music!” Tía Paloma’s high voice rang out. “You’re right, Mami, we need music. Elena loves music, and Abuelita, and her abuela. Bisabuela doesn’t, but she’s an old crab apple anyway.”
Who was Tía Paloma talking to? Leo saw Mamá setting one of her woven-plastic shopping bags on the baking table, pulling out candles and cloth and colorful ribbons, and lining them up along the edge of the table. Tía Paloma pushed through the swinging shuttered doors into the storefront, and a few seconds later, a voice moaned what sounded like an old love song in Spanish. Leo thought all songs in Spanish sounded like love songs, because they had so many long wailing notes. They were the kind of songs that made you want to clutch your chest and belt them out as loud as you could.
Leo stopped trying to pick out recognizable words from the crooning music—“amor” was an easy one—and tried to find Isabel. Her sister was measuring ingredients into a small mixing bowl, letting puffs of flour escape to dust the counter as the mixer spun in lazy circles. Leo smelled vanilla, and cinnamon, and something spicy that tickled her nose and comforted her, even though she couldn’t decide if it was a familiar smell or a brand-new one.
Tía Paloma came back through the swinging doors and helped Mamá spread a colorful handmade quilt over the wooden table. Leo recognized the quilt as one of the ones her bisabuela, Mamá’s grandmother, had made. Abuela used to make ones just like it, though hers were sometimes sewn out of old T-shirts and clothes that Leo and her sisters had outgrown. Maybe this was what Mamá had meant when she had told Tía Paloma to bring Abuelita?
But still . . . you couldn’t make bread on top of your bisabuela’s quilt.
The back door slammed; someone sighed in a long huff.
“Your candles.” Marisol slammed a bag on the table. Even from her spot in the cabinet, Leo could tell she was rolling her eyes, and Leo rolled her eyes right back. Marisol didn’t even care, while Leo would have given anything to be included.
“There you are,” Mamá said. “Did it go okay? Are you tired? Why is your phone out? Is that what took you so long?”
Tía Paloma hurried to the back of the kitchen with her arms full of white billowy fabric, then crossed Leo’s line of sight again, pushing Alma and Belén through the swinging doors toward the bathrooms in the front of the shop.
“My friends are telling me everything I’m missing at school.” Marisol tapped her phone screen.
“Aren’t you lucky to be so popular?” Mamá held out a hand. Marisol glowered and dropped her phone into Mamá’s palm. “Help your sister with the dough, please. Your friends will fill you in tomorrow.”
Marisol sighed and joined Isabel at the counter. Mamá continued to take items out of her bag. When the phone at the front of the store started to ring, Isabel ran to answer it.
“Hello, you’ve reached Amor y Azúcar Panadería. We’re actually closed today, but if you’d like to stop by tomorrow for our Day of the Dead festival, you can.” Isabel paused. “Oh! Yes, yes, of course you can. Just give me one minute.” She peeked her head into the kitchen, one hand covering the phone. “An order, Mamá,” she whispered. “A special order.”
Mamá nodded and reached into her pocket, pulling out a folded piece of yellow lined paper and a blue mechanical pencil.
“Two orders of pan de la suerte,” Isabel spoke out loud. Mamá scribbled on the paper. “And what’s the occasion? Oh, a wedding reception! Yes, we’d be happy to help. If you’ll just give me your name and when you need to pick them up . . .” Mamá brought her the paper, and Isabel wrote down the information. “Thank you so much, and have a nice day. Oh, and good luck with the wedding.” She laughed.
Pan de la suerte? Leo knew every kind of bread and cake Amor y Azúcar Bakery made, but she had no idea what pan de la suerte was. Didn’t “suerte” mean luck?
“Thanks, mija.” Mamá took the list back and tucked it into her pocket with the pencil. “We’ll have to get more chocolate coins—good thing candy will be on sale after tomorrow. The full moon is on Sunday, isn’t it? We’ll have to start then. Oh, I can’t wait to teach you! I haven’t made pan de la suerte in such a long time.”
Marisol snorted, but if Mamá heard her, she ignored it. Isabel just smiled. Leo was more confused than ever. She didn’t know any kind of bread made out of chocolate coins and moonlight.
Tía Paloma skipped to the long table, where Mamá lined up candles on top of the quilt. Alma and Belén followed, both dragging their feet under long white robes that made them look like angels in a nativity play. The robes tied at the waist with thick red sashes, and the twin’s colored bangs were hidden under black veils on their heads. They stood just inside the kitchen doorway, looking almost as confused as Leo felt.
“Oh, who brought a light?” Tía Paloma crooned as she made a last adjustment to one of Mamá’s candles. “I meant to, only I got caught up in who knows what and . . .”
Mamá and Marisol reached out from opposite ends of the table—Mamá holding a book of matches, Marisol a purple plastic cigarette lighter.
Leo was grateful that she could only see half of Mamá’s face, and therefore only half of the evil eye Mamá aimed at Marisol.
Marisol, though, seemed unaffected. “What?”
“That better not have been in your pocket a minute ago” was all Mamá said.
She snatched the lighter and handed it to Tía Paloma. When Tía lit the first candle, all the lights in the kitchen went out. The radio too stopped playing, and there was no one in the front of the store to turn it off. Leo shivered.
Isabel, Alma, and Belén joined Mamá and Marisol at the table while Tía Paloma continued lighting candles. Isabel dropped a hunk of unbaked dough on the center of the quilt, and all six women spread out until they were spaced evenly around the table.
Before Mamá took her place at one end, her tall frame blocking most of the action from Leo’s view, Leo caught one glimpse of Tía Paloma at the far end with a hand hovering in the air over one of the candles. The flickering flames made colors and shapes strange, but Leo thought for a second that Tía Paloma’s eyes had turned completely white, like dollops of wax dripping off the tall white candle in front of her.
The cupboard had always been dark, but now Leo felt the darkness pressing against her. She tried to see what was happening beyond Mamá’s back.
“Mujeres,” Mamá said, and Leo gripped her knees tig
hter because Mamá’s voice always sounded different when she spoke Spanish, faster and lower and unfamiliar. It was scary to know her Mamá had another voice. “Hijas de nuestra familia, nos unimos juntas aquí para prepararnos, y para dar la bienvenida a nuestras hermanas nuevas, Alma y Belén.”
Leo didn’t know most of those words, but she knew “familia” meant family (that one was easy), and “hermanas” meant sisters. She thought there were some other words she should have recognized, but it all went so fast that she couldn’t pin them down.
A horrible thought popped into Leo’s head—did Mamá not want her help because she didn’t speak Spanish?
Mamá continued, and Leo could hear the poetry in the words even if she couldn’t understand them. She heard the words for bread, and sister and light, and one word that Mamá kept saying that Leo knew she had heard before. It was on the tip of her tongue.
“. . . atadas por sangre . . .”
Mamá paused and nodded at Marisol. Leo couldn’t see what was happening.
Over the smell of burning candles, the same strange scent that had come out of Isabel’s baking slipped through the cupboard crack. Leo wrinkled her nose trying to recognize the tingly smell, but she still couldn’t tell if she knew it.
Leo was curious, and she never was very good at ignoring curiosity. If she could just peek around Mamá’s shoulder, she would have a view of Marisol and the center of the table. The room seemed dark enough. Leo pushed the cabinet door ajar with a light touch, then leaned out, slowly and so quietly, just far enough that she could see around Mamá’s back.
Marisol looked pale and ghostly in the flickering light with her thick black eyeliner. She held out a long silver knife. This was not the sort of knife Mamá kept in the bakery or at home in the kitchen. It was not a butter knife or a steak knife or a knife for chopping vegetables or slicing bread. It was the sort of knife you might see in a movie about elves and knights and princesses and dragons. Instead of a handle, it had what could only be described as a hilt. The bottom of the hilt was a tiny skull decorated with roses and swirling lines.
