Page 105 of The Treasure House

Flo fetched my laptop and we watched a couple of homemade instructional videos for antique wood oven ranges. Then Flo moved on to videos about how to bake cakes in one and left me to play with the range.

I fetched well-seasoned hardwood from outside and started a fire in the firebox.

“Hey!” Flo suddenly yelped. “Did you make sure the pipe thing was clean? This lady said she set fire to her kitchen by not cleaning her pipe thing.”

My heart stopped. Then I remembered that Jake had checked it when he’d done the chimneys. “Just in case,” he’d said, winking at me. I’d scoffed, sure there was no way I’d ever be using the ancient thing.

“It’s fine.” I breathed out shakily, glad to see the flue was working and the kitchen wasn’t filling with smoke. “Shall we start by using the stovetop?” I suggested nervously. “We could boil some water?”

“No, look, this video says pancakes are the best thing to start with.” Flo was gleeful.

“Seriously?” I was dubious, but she showed me the video. Sure enough, the guy on the screen showed how pancakes were perfect to teach you how to play around with the bypass to control the temperature. “Okay then, let’s do this.”

Together we whipped up the batter, and I gave Flo a long lecture about how hot the stove was and how to be safe around it. She rolled her eyes at me a lot, but I could tell she was listening.

Our first pancakes were a total disaster. It was around our third batch of batter that we got the hang of it. I’d never felt such a sense of triumph as I did regarding the perfect stack of fluffy golden pancakes at the end of the afternoon. Flo was grinning ear to ear as she high-fived me. She was grinning even more as she poured syrup all over the pancakes and scarfed them down.

“I can’t wait to tell Doris we did it!” I said, feeling giddy. I’d mastered the range! All by myself. Well, with Flo’s help, but mostly by myself. I felt indescribably proud. We’d had a lot of help with the house so far, but this we’d done all by ourselves.

“Don’t tell her,” Florence urged, high on sugar. “Let’s not tell anyone. Let’s just ask everyone around to dinner and serve them the best meal they’ve ever had and act all casual, like, ‘Oh, this? Yes, we just whipped it up on our black-and-white times stove.’ ”

I laughed. But then I considered it. “You know what? Yes!”

Flo’s eyes widened. “What? Really?”

“Yes, let’s have a dinner party! And we won’t tell them until afterward that we cooked dinner on the range.”

She was excited. “What should we cook?”

“Something easy.” I giggled. “I don’t want to serve them charred food.”

We ate pancakes for dinner and searched for recipes online. And a week later, after a lot of practice and a bunch of both burned and half-raw attempts, Flo and I had mastered roasting a chicken and baking a simple chocolate cake.

We invited all our neighbors, set the dining table with our newly polished silver cutlery, and set out the mismatched wineglasses. The house smelled gloriously of roasting chicken and Flo had iced our cake with about three inches of frosting.

And there was nothing better in the world than the laughter and applause from our neighbors, or Jake’s warm, proud gaze, when we showed them where we’d cooked our masterpieces. I don’t know that I’d ever felt so good in my life.

Twenty-Four

December crept in, icy and bright with frost. The approaching holidays seemed extra magical in our new house. We gathered sprigs of holly and mistletoe from our garden, and practiced baking gingerbread in our range. We even got our Christmas tree from our own patch of woods. Jake showed us how to pay the tree registration fee (who even knew there was such a thing?), and we headed out on a bright Saturday morning, to the accompaniment of Alan’s bagpipes. Jake wasn’t a fan, but I quite liked the mournful wailing of the pipes through the shivery morning air. It made me feel like I was in Outlander. Hazel loved it too, maybe a little too much, barking like a maniac at every note.

There had been a light dusting of snow over the past two days, but not enough to qualify as actual snow, in Flo’s opinion. Thin white powder frosted the spines of the branches and clung to dips in the earth, but otherwise everything was still drab brown and green.

“I thought there was supposed to be a lot of snow in Maine,” Flo complained as we tramped through the woods to the stand of balsam firs at the far edge of our property.

“When it comes, there’ll be so much of it, you’ll wish it away,” Jake promised her.

“There better be. And it better come by Christmas.” Flo slapped her hand on the trunk of a stout fir. “How about this one?”

“That is never going to fit in our house,” I told her firmly.

“This is probably more your speed.” Jake pointed to a fat little tree.

“That’s not even as tall as you are,” Flo complained, pouting at him.

“No, but it’s the right size for us to carry home. Try and imagine it decorated.” He stepped back and considered its shape. “It’s got a straight trunk and nice symmetrical boughs.”

“I don’t mind a wonky tree,” Flo protested. “That’s how you know it’s real and not fake.”