Gingerbread Houses
By
Heather Monson
By
Heather Monson
People who live in gingerbread houses should not live in rainy forests, the witch thought for the umpteenth time, as she placed a bucket under the newest leak in the roof and rolled out another batch of shingles.
She started the oven preheating — a natural gas, stainless steel, professional-grade oven that was the pride and joy of her existence. She cut the gingerbread dough into perfect squares and transferred the squares to cookie sheets.
She stopped, spatula in hand, when she heard a rustling on the front porch and hurried to the sugar-glass window to peer out.
There wasn’t much left of the forest, sadly. The only tall trees left in the neighborhood were in her own sprawling back yard. But she couldn’t argue with the convenience of supermarkets and a light rail. Sneaking into the big city on weekends was the witch’s guilty pleasure.
She turned her attention to her front porch. A child—a boy, perhaps seven or eight years old—stood there calmly, staring out at the falling rain.
The witch’s stomach did a flip-flop. She had lived in this gingerbread house all her long life, but never before had a child come all the way to her door. Children had stared and pointed from the safety of the sidewalk. Some had thrown rocks, until she hexed them. A few had even opened the gate on a dare, but none had come all the way to her doorstep, until this one. Bother, thought the witch. Parents seemed far less understanding about breadcrumb-trails and cages than they had been in days of yore... Did she remember the rules? The witch scowled. She did not want a child anywhere near, let alone inside, her precious oven. She would have to scare him off. The rules allowed children to run away. She opened the door.
“Well?” the witch sneered. “Aren’t you going to nibble the ginger-bricks? Maybe lick the lollipop doorknob? Or will you throw stones through my sugar-glass windows? I hexed the last child who did that with tone-deafness and an insatiable love of karaoke.”
The child jumped when the door opened, but faced the rest calmly. “You mean this is real food?”
The witch glowered. “Entirely.”
The child made a face. “Ew. It’s getting moldy.”
He pointed, and, sure enough, the fruitcake foundation-blocks were getting moldy. “Oh, damn,” said the witch, then hexed the mold to dust that washed into the soil by the candy-cane fence.
The child was impressed. “I bet Gran would love to know how to do that.”
The witch rolled her eyes. The child was not frightened. The rules were clear… “Won’t you come in?” she asked through gritted teeth. “There’s fresh gingerbread baking.”
The child hesitated. “I guess it’s okay,” he decided. “We’re neighbors.”
He walked into the house. The witch stared at her neighbors’ homes, quite sure this child did not belong in any of them. She closed the door. The child stood in the parlor, dripping water on the nougat sofa cushions and pressing buttons on a tiny plastic-and-metal box.
“What are you doing?” the witch asked.
“Texting Gran so she knows where I am,” the child answered. He put the box — when did cell phones get so small? the witch wondered — back in his bag and looked at her expectantly. The witch felt flummoxed — the rules didn’t say anything about texting — but quickly recovered. “Ah. Gingerbread. It’s still baking.”
The boy nodded and followed her into the kitchen. Dratted nuisance, the witch thought. “You mentioned we’re neighbors,” she said. “I haven’t met you before.”
“Moved in last week with Gran and Grumps,” the boy replied. Gran and Grumps — probably the retired couple who used to run Minnie’s Café downtown. The boy set down his backpack and sat at the kitchen table, kicking his feet against the chair legs exactly as the witch’s little sister had when they’d both been young. The witch turned away.
A dreadful thought occurred to her. Was the boy a foundling child? The rules got terribly complicated for foundling children, and she didn’t want to raise him, any more than she wanted to bake him. “Where are your parents?” she asked.
The boy shrugged miserably. The witch let the subject drop. If she didn’t know he was a foundling child, she didn’t have to follow those rules. She went to the cupboard. “Milk?” she asked.
“No, thanks,” the child replied. “I’m lactose intolerant.”
The witch blinked and wondered what to do. Children were supposed to eat cookies with milk. “Er… tea, then?” she asked after a moment.
“Do you have any soda?” the boy asked.
“No,” said the witch. “Dreadful stuff rots your teeth.”
The child started laughing and laughed even harder at the witch’s perplexed expression. “You live in a gingerbread house,” he explained between giggles. “Your walls are covered in candy. And you’re worried about teeth rotting?”
The witch caught herself smiling and stopped. “Tea, then?”
The boy nodded. “Sure, I’ll try it.”
The witch filled the teakettle and put it on the stove. She looked at the child. Fattening him up would take a long time… The child adjusted the too-large glasses on his nose and stared back.
The witch turned back to the teapot. “Have you a name, boy?” she asked.
“Tom,” the child replied. “What’s yours?”
“Brunhildegarde,” the witch replied.
Tom tried to repeat it but stumbled over the syllables.
The witch hesitated. “Brinna. My sister called me that, when she was your age. You may, too.” Though it wasn’t forbidden, the witch thought that sharing a nickname and a childhood memory with one’s would-be culinary endeavor went against the spirit of the rules.
“Brinna,” Tom repeated and nodded. “Why’d your parents give you such a hard name?”
“Tradition,” Brinna replied shortly. She magically hurried the kettle to boiling and retrieved her strainer and tea leaves.
“Does your sister live here, too?” Tom asked.
Brinna set the tea to steeping and shook her head. “The gingerbread life wasn’t for her. She left, a long time ago. She still sends postcards.” The postcards, at first, had come from the university, then different cities, then different countries. But, in recent years, they all came with pictures of a happy, normal family. Last year’s card featured a grandbaby. Brinna hated the cards, all of them, but kept them carefully tied with a nice ribbon in the drawer of her bedside table.
Brinna poured the tea. “Cream? Sugar?”
Tom grinned. “Nah, they’ll rot my teeth.”
Brinna smiled in spite of herself. “Straight it is, then.” She poured two mugs and got the gingerbread out of the oven.
Just then, Tom’s phone beeped. He pulled it out and pushed a button. “It’s Gran. She wants me home,” he said. He picked up his backpack and walked to the door. “It was nice meeting you, Brinna.”
He opened the door and left. Brinna watched him go. Well, they are allowed to run away, she thought wistfully.
The next time it rained, Tom came back. He brought two bottles of his favorite soda. “Gran says it’s okay to visit you,” he said, “as long as I’m home before dinner.”
Brinna discovered that she did not like soda (though, if boiled long enough, it might make a nice doorknob). Tom discovered that he did not like tea. But he loved Brinna’s gingerbread.
“You should sell this stuff,” Tom said around a mouthful. “I bet lots of people would buy it.”
Before dinner, Tom left again. According to the rules, Brinna should have tried to stop him, but she was confident Tom would visit again. Besides, she couldn’t afford to fatten up a growing boy.
Tom came every time it rained after school, and Brinna baked fresh gingerbread whenever the weather forecast said afternoon rain.
Brinna learned that Tom was not seven or eight – he was almost ten. He was just small for his age and didn’t like to talk about it. There were a lot of things Tom didn’t like to talk about, but he did like to talk about what he was going to do.
Tom was going to get a good education, for starters. His pack was always heavy with books. He was going to get a scholarship to the best schools. He was going to become a businessman, a doctor, an astronaut. He was going to play basketball. He was going to climb Mount Everest, then build a submarine that could go right down the Marianna Trench (and, yes, he knew exactly where both were located). He was going to find a cure for cancer. He was going to fly to the Moon, then on to Mars, then a lot of other places if he could. He was going to go to Australia, just because.
Brinna found she liked listening, just because. It had been a long time since she had allowed herself any dreams.
“Why do you stay here?” Tom asked one cold, rainy day. He had come with a very red nose and a cough, so he was sipping Brinna’s cold-mending potion, instead of his usual soda. Brinna grumbled while setting old towels under the newest leak in the roof. “You spend so much time baking stuff to repair it, but it still leaks, and you’re always chasing mice away from it, and I heard Gran talking about what the developer would’ve paid you for the land. How come you don’t move?”
“Tradition,” Brinna answered without thinking.
“That’s what you say for a lot of things,” Tom pressed. “Really, why?”
“Tradition,” Brinna repeated, but she sent him home with extra gingerbread.
That winter was a harsh one. Brinna slipped while fixing her roof and took a bad fall. She woke up in the hospital with one leg in a cast, aches all over, and a doctor telling her sternly that she was much too old to fix roofs.
After the doctor left, Brinna noticed that someone else was still in the room – a plump old woman with curly iron-gray hair and thick glasses. She looked vaguely familiar. Her knitting needles clicked in rhythm regular as a heartbeat.
“Hello, there,” she said in a cheerful-but-firm voice. She looked right at Brinna, without interrupting her clicking needles at all. “I’m Minnie Johnston, Thomas’s grandmother. You’re going to come stay with us for a bit, until your leg’s better.”
“No,” said Brinna, even more firmly. She checked herself out of the hospital and went home.
She was in the middle of brewing a bone-mending potion, and had not even thought about gingerbread, when there was a knock at the door.
“Confound it,” she muttered — the potion had to be stirred, constantly, counter-clockwise, until it reached 350 degrees. “Come in!” she hollered.
She heard the door open and close, and Tom stood in the kitchen doorway. He looked angry. “Why didn’t you come stay with us?” he asked, without saying hello.
Brinna stopped stirring her potion. It gave off a puff of noxious green smoke, and another of sparkling purplish-black ashes, and was ruined. “Confound it,” she muttered. She tried to figure a way of getting the heavy pot to the sink while it was hot and she was on crutches. “Curse and confound it…”
Tom went on. “I know Gran asked you. She made up the spare room and everything!”
Brinna sighed and left the ruined potion where it was. “This is home. Besides, the old place needs somebody to look after it.”
Tom stomped his foot hard enough to crack one of the peppermint tiles. “The old place is about to come crashing down! What if the roof gets soggy enough to collapse? What if the house blows over in a storm? What would’ve happened this time if it hadn’t started snowing on the way home from school?”
Brinna realized who must’ve found her and called an ambulance. Then she realized Tom was genuinely upset. His voice cracked, and tears welled up behind his glasses. “I don’t want to lose anybody else!” he finished.
Brinna didn’t know what to do. “I’m sorry,” she said quietly, while Tom tried to pretend he wasn’t sniffling. That didn’t quite seem to cover things, but Brinna remembered something that might. She handed Tom a handkerchief. “Wait here a moment.” She hobbled back to her own room and returned with a very old album tucked under one arm. She bespelled the dust off, but couldn’t mend one corner that a mouse had nibbled.
She opened it toward the back, to a page with a black-and-white photograph. “It will make more sense going backwards. See? That’s me, long time ago. That’s my sister, there’s my mum, there’s Dad before he vanished. That’s how the house looked, sixty-odd years ago. Mum liked rounded shingles. Mum’s name was Brunhildegarde, as well.”
She turned to the previous page and an older photograph. “There’s Mum, with her mum and sisters. Grandmother Brunhildegarde had a secret recipe for spun-sugar arches. You can see one, there, in the background.”
She turned to the previous page. “Here’s Grandmother Brunhildegarde, with her parents. You can see that their gingerbread-trim was real gingerbread.”
She kept turning pages and introducing Tom to more generations of Brunhildegardes and the gingerbread house. Photographs turned to illustrations that, toward the beginning, were almost too faded to recognize. “That’s why I stay, Tom. There has been a gingerbread house, and a witch named Brunhildegarde, on this spot of land for four hundred twenty-three years. I don’t know what will happen to it, when I’m gone.”
“That’s really cool. Thanks for showing me,” Tom said. His forehead wrinkled up in thought. “The house has changed a lot,” he said. “All the Brun… um… all the ones before you… changed it a lot, made it theirs. But you just changed the shingles.”
Brinna shrugged. “I’m not much for design.”
“What did you want to do?” Tom asked, his forehead still wrinkled in thought. “When you were my age, what did you want to do?”
Brinna paused to consider. “I knew I’d stay here. I was the Brunhildegarde.”
“But what did you want to do? What do you want to do?”
Brinna was rather taken aback. “Well… I’ve always liked baking. I’ve always liked the big city. I might’ve studied to be a chef, maybe started a café of my own.”
Tom’s forehead unwrinkled. He grinned and kicked his feet happily against the chair legs. “I’ve got an idea. I know you don’t want to stay with us, but will you come to dinner? On Saturday, maybe?”
Brinna hesitated. Nothing in the rules, or in her own experience, proscribed how to handle friendly neighbors. “If it’s all right with your Gran and Grumps,” she answered.
“Great.” Tom smiled and stood up.
“Tom,” Brinna began, “you’ve asked a lot of questions today. May I ask you one?”
“Sure,” Tom replied.
“Why did you keep coming back?”
Tom hesitated, and his forehead wrinkled up again. “Because we’re the same, I guess. We’re both alone.”
Brinna raised her eyebrows. “Your Gran and Grumps take proper care of you, don’t they?”
Tom smiled, but it was a small, sad smile that had no business on a child’s face. “You don’t have to be by yourself to be alone,” he said. “See you Saturday.” And with that, he left.
Saturday came, and, while Brinna enjoyed the meal, she walked away with more food for thought.
After a couple of days, she called the developer who had been trying for the better part of two decades to buy her land and set an appointment to meet him and discuss conditions on Thursday.
Mr. Harold Dotsbrough, a down-to-earth fellow with gray hair cut short, arrived precisely on schedule. Brinna ushered him into the parlor. “Shall we discuss my conditions?” she asked.
Mr. Dotsbrough nodded warily—in years past, the conversation had dissolved into Brinna’s best maniacal laugh at this point. But this time was different.
“First, I want it named after this place,” Brinna began. “Gingerbread Circle, Gingerbread Lane, something like that. Second, I want the four plots with the enormous old pines turned into a community park. I know, that lowers what you’ll pay me for the land, but it increases the value of the community, and they’re the last bits of the old forest. The trees stay. And third, I’d like you to preserve the look of the place.”
Mr. Dotsbrough looked relieved. “Done, done, and we were planning that, anyway.” He pulled blueprints from his bag, designs for houses and townhomes. They looked very familiar. Mr. Dotsbrough continued, “Our architects used old photographs of this place for inspiration.”
Brinna nodded and smiled. “Then, as long as we can agree on a price, we have a deal.”
Even minus the land for the park, Mr. Dotsbrough’s offer still seemed generous to Brinna. She haggled it several thousand higher, just because she could. Two weeks later, the contract was signed, and the deal was closed.
Brinna bought a place downtown, with a shop downstairs and a flat upstairs. The roof did not have one single leak, and Brinna’s natural gas, stainless steel, professional-grade oven fit perfectly in the back of the shop. Tom’s Gran and Grumps helped Brinna navigate the maze of licenses and permits. In the evenings, while grown-ups discussed Brinna’s new business, Tom sat in a corner, writing everything down.
Two months later, Brinna’s Bites opened for business and was an immediate hit. The goth crowd raved over her décor. The health crowd adored her homeopathic remedies. Young children clamored for her candies. Busy businesspeople stopped by every afternoon for her pastries and coffee. And everyone who tried it loved her gingerbread. The very busiest time of year was around Christmas, when everyone for miles around wanted one of her fabulously ornate gingerbread houses to decorate their holiday tables. Only Brinna and Tom knew that each house was modeled after one generation or another of Brinna’s old gingerbread house.
One blustery evening that had the faintest hint of spring in the air, Brinna sat down with a mug of tea and a tired but very contented sigh. Tom, who had been sprawled across her new sofa (upholstered cushions were much more practical than nougat ones, Brinna had decided), sat up eagerly.
“All done?” he asked.
“For today,” Brinna replied with a grin. “Shouldn’t you be heading home for dinner?”
“Gran knows I’ll be late,” Tom replied. “I wanted to show you this.” He pulled an envelope out of his pack.
Brinna squinted. The envelope had a fancy seal on its front and looked as though it had been torn open with some gusto. Tom grinned sheepishly.
“I meant to wait and open it when the shop closed, but I couldn’t wait,” he explained. “You remember all that stuff I was writing down, about how we came up with Brinna’s Bites and what we all did to get it open and running?”
Brinna nodded. “I’d wondered what you were going to do with it all.”
“Well, I entered it in a contest for young entrepreneurs,” Tom continued. His face broke into a huge smile, and he practically bounced across the room to hand the letter to Brinna. “I won! I won it, Brinna!”
Brinna skimmed through the letter. “A full scholarship to Jeffries Memorial Preparatory Academy! Oh, Tom!” Brinna surprised herself by pulling the boy into a tight, grandmotherly hug.
Tom hugged her back. “It’s the best private school in the whole state,” he told Brinna. “I’ll start in the fall.”
Brinna surprised herself again by tearing up, just a tiny bit. “Does this mean you’ll be going away?”
Tom shook his head. “The school is here in the city. I’ll still come every time it rains.”
Brinna grinned. “I’ll have gingerbread waiting.”
Tom smiled and looked relieved. “I’m glad that won’t change.”
Some things did change when Tom started at his new school. He started wearing school uniforms. He studied even harder and rose to the top of his class. He found time to join an intramural sports team. Toward the end of his first year, he finally hit a growth spurt.
True to his word, no matter how busy he got, whenever it rained, he appeared like magic on Brinna’s doorstep, and Brinna always had gingerbread ready. As his second year began, he started bringing friends with him.
That winter, before the usual card from her sister arrived, Brinna decided to send some postcards, herself. On the front was printed a photograph of herself, Tom, Gran, Grumps, Tom’s friends, Brinna’s employees, and a good crowd of customers who wanted in on the fun. Each of them held their very own gingerbread house.
Brinna sent most of the cards to family and friends, but she kept one for herself and carefully pasted it on the last empty page of the album.
Heather Monson writes technical nonfiction for a living and writes fiction when her brain and fingers have words left in them at the end of the day. She also costumes, quilts, crochets, and takes very long walks. She lives in Utah with her husband and baby, and thinks the world of both of them.
She started the oven preheating — a natural gas, stainless steel, professional-grade oven that was the pride and joy of her existence. She cut the gingerbread dough into perfect squares and transferred the squares to cookie sheets.
She stopped, spatula in hand, when she heard a rustling on the front porch and hurried to the sugar-glass window to peer out.
There wasn’t much left of the forest, sadly. The only tall trees left in the neighborhood were in her own sprawling back yard. But she couldn’t argue with the convenience of supermarkets and a light rail. Sneaking into the big city on weekends was the witch’s guilty pleasure.
She turned her attention to her front porch. A child—a boy, perhaps seven or eight years old—stood there calmly, staring out at the falling rain.
The witch’s stomach did a flip-flop. She had lived in this gingerbread house all her long life, but never before had a child come all the way to her door. Children had stared and pointed from the safety of the sidewalk. Some had thrown rocks, until she hexed them. A few had even opened the gate on a dare, but none had come all the way to her doorstep, until this one. Bother, thought the witch. Parents seemed far less understanding about breadcrumb-trails and cages than they had been in days of yore... Did she remember the rules? The witch scowled. She did not want a child anywhere near, let alone inside, her precious oven. She would have to scare him off. The rules allowed children to run away. She opened the door.
“Well?” the witch sneered. “Aren’t you going to nibble the ginger-bricks? Maybe lick the lollipop doorknob? Or will you throw stones through my sugar-glass windows? I hexed the last child who did that with tone-deafness and an insatiable love of karaoke.”
The child jumped when the door opened, but faced the rest calmly. “You mean this is real food?”
The witch glowered. “Entirely.”
The child made a face. “Ew. It’s getting moldy.”
He pointed, and, sure enough, the fruitcake foundation-blocks were getting moldy. “Oh, damn,” said the witch, then hexed the mold to dust that washed into the soil by the candy-cane fence.
The child was impressed. “I bet Gran would love to know how to do that.”
The witch rolled her eyes. The child was not frightened. The rules were clear… “Won’t you come in?” she asked through gritted teeth. “There’s fresh gingerbread baking.”
The child hesitated. “I guess it’s okay,” he decided. “We’re neighbors.”
He walked into the house. The witch stared at her neighbors’ homes, quite sure this child did not belong in any of them. She closed the door. The child stood in the parlor, dripping water on the nougat sofa cushions and pressing buttons on a tiny plastic-and-metal box.
“What are you doing?” the witch asked.
“Texting Gran so she knows where I am,” the child answered. He put the box — when did cell phones get so small? the witch wondered — back in his bag and looked at her expectantly. The witch felt flummoxed — the rules didn’t say anything about texting — but quickly recovered. “Ah. Gingerbread. It’s still baking.”
The boy nodded and followed her into the kitchen. Dratted nuisance, the witch thought. “You mentioned we’re neighbors,” she said. “I haven’t met you before.”
“Moved in last week with Gran and Grumps,” the boy replied. Gran and Grumps — probably the retired couple who used to run Minnie’s Café downtown. The boy set down his backpack and sat at the kitchen table, kicking his feet against the chair legs exactly as the witch’s little sister had when they’d both been young. The witch turned away.
A dreadful thought occurred to her. Was the boy a foundling child? The rules got terribly complicated for foundling children, and she didn’t want to raise him, any more than she wanted to bake him. “Where are your parents?” she asked.
The boy shrugged miserably. The witch let the subject drop. If she didn’t know he was a foundling child, she didn’t have to follow those rules. She went to the cupboard. “Milk?” she asked.
“No, thanks,” the child replied. “I’m lactose intolerant.”
The witch blinked and wondered what to do. Children were supposed to eat cookies with milk. “Er… tea, then?” she asked after a moment.
“Do you have any soda?” the boy asked.
“No,” said the witch. “Dreadful stuff rots your teeth.”
The child started laughing and laughed even harder at the witch’s perplexed expression. “You live in a gingerbread house,” he explained between giggles. “Your walls are covered in candy. And you’re worried about teeth rotting?”
The witch caught herself smiling and stopped. “Tea, then?”
The boy nodded. “Sure, I’ll try it.”
The witch filled the teakettle and put it on the stove. She looked at the child. Fattening him up would take a long time… The child adjusted the too-large glasses on his nose and stared back.
The witch turned back to the teapot. “Have you a name, boy?” she asked.
“Tom,” the child replied. “What’s yours?”
“Brunhildegarde,” the witch replied.
Tom tried to repeat it but stumbled over the syllables.
The witch hesitated. “Brinna. My sister called me that, when she was your age. You may, too.” Though it wasn’t forbidden, the witch thought that sharing a nickname and a childhood memory with one’s would-be culinary endeavor went against the spirit of the rules.
“Brinna,” Tom repeated and nodded. “Why’d your parents give you such a hard name?”
“Tradition,” Brinna replied shortly. She magically hurried the kettle to boiling and retrieved her strainer and tea leaves.
“Does your sister live here, too?” Tom asked.
Brinna set the tea to steeping and shook her head. “The gingerbread life wasn’t for her. She left, a long time ago. She still sends postcards.” The postcards, at first, had come from the university, then different cities, then different countries. But, in recent years, they all came with pictures of a happy, normal family. Last year’s card featured a grandbaby. Brinna hated the cards, all of them, but kept them carefully tied with a nice ribbon in the drawer of her bedside table.
Brinna poured the tea. “Cream? Sugar?”
Tom grinned. “Nah, they’ll rot my teeth.”
Brinna smiled in spite of herself. “Straight it is, then.” She poured two mugs and got the gingerbread out of the oven.
Just then, Tom’s phone beeped. He pulled it out and pushed a button. “It’s Gran. She wants me home,” he said. He picked up his backpack and walked to the door. “It was nice meeting you, Brinna.”
He opened the door and left. Brinna watched him go. Well, they are allowed to run away, she thought wistfully.
The next time it rained, Tom came back. He brought two bottles of his favorite soda. “Gran says it’s okay to visit you,” he said, “as long as I’m home before dinner.”
Brinna discovered that she did not like soda (though, if boiled long enough, it might make a nice doorknob). Tom discovered that he did not like tea. But he loved Brinna’s gingerbread.
“You should sell this stuff,” Tom said around a mouthful. “I bet lots of people would buy it.”
Before dinner, Tom left again. According to the rules, Brinna should have tried to stop him, but she was confident Tom would visit again. Besides, she couldn’t afford to fatten up a growing boy.
Tom came every time it rained after school, and Brinna baked fresh gingerbread whenever the weather forecast said afternoon rain.
Brinna learned that Tom was not seven or eight – he was almost ten. He was just small for his age and didn’t like to talk about it. There were a lot of things Tom didn’t like to talk about, but he did like to talk about what he was going to do.
Tom was going to get a good education, for starters. His pack was always heavy with books. He was going to get a scholarship to the best schools. He was going to become a businessman, a doctor, an astronaut. He was going to play basketball. He was going to climb Mount Everest, then build a submarine that could go right down the Marianna Trench (and, yes, he knew exactly where both were located). He was going to find a cure for cancer. He was going to fly to the Moon, then on to Mars, then a lot of other places if he could. He was going to go to Australia, just because.
Brinna found she liked listening, just because. It had been a long time since she had allowed herself any dreams.
“Why do you stay here?” Tom asked one cold, rainy day. He had come with a very red nose and a cough, so he was sipping Brinna’s cold-mending potion, instead of his usual soda. Brinna grumbled while setting old towels under the newest leak in the roof. “You spend so much time baking stuff to repair it, but it still leaks, and you’re always chasing mice away from it, and I heard Gran talking about what the developer would’ve paid you for the land. How come you don’t move?”
“Tradition,” Brinna answered without thinking.
“That’s what you say for a lot of things,” Tom pressed. “Really, why?”
“Tradition,” Brinna repeated, but she sent him home with extra gingerbread.
That winter was a harsh one. Brinna slipped while fixing her roof and took a bad fall. She woke up in the hospital with one leg in a cast, aches all over, and a doctor telling her sternly that she was much too old to fix roofs.
After the doctor left, Brinna noticed that someone else was still in the room – a plump old woman with curly iron-gray hair and thick glasses. She looked vaguely familiar. Her knitting needles clicked in rhythm regular as a heartbeat.
“Hello, there,” she said in a cheerful-but-firm voice. She looked right at Brinna, without interrupting her clicking needles at all. “I’m Minnie Johnston, Thomas’s grandmother. You’re going to come stay with us for a bit, until your leg’s better.”
“No,” said Brinna, even more firmly. She checked herself out of the hospital and went home.
She was in the middle of brewing a bone-mending potion, and had not even thought about gingerbread, when there was a knock at the door.
“Confound it,” she muttered — the potion had to be stirred, constantly, counter-clockwise, until it reached 350 degrees. “Come in!” she hollered.
She heard the door open and close, and Tom stood in the kitchen doorway. He looked angry. “Why didn’t you come stay with us?” he asked, without saying hello.
Brinna stopped stirring her potion. It gave off a puff of noxious green smoke, and another of sparkling purplish-black ashes, and was ruined. “Confound it,” she muttered. She tried to figure a way of getting the heavy pot to the sink while it was hot and she was on crutches. “Curse and confound it…”
Tom went on. “I know Gran asked you. She made up the spare room and everything!”
Brinna sighed and left the ruined potion where it was. “This is home. Besides, the old place needs somebody to look after it.”
Tom stomped his foot hard enough to crack one of the peppermint tiles. “The old place is about to come crashing down! What if the roof gets soggy enough to collapse? What if the house blows over in a storm? What would’ve happened this time if it hadn’t started snowing on the way home from school?”
Brinna realized who must’ve found her and called an ambulance. Then she realized Tom was genuinely upset. His voice cracked, and tears welled up behind his glasses. “I don’t want to lose anybody else!” he finished.
Brinna didn’t know what to do. “I’m sorry,” she said quietly, while Tom tried to pretend he wasn’t sniffling. That didn’t quite seem to cover things, but Brinna remembered something that might. She handed Tom a handkerchief. “Wait here a moment.” She hobbled back to her own room and returned with a very old album tucked under one arm. She bespelled the dust off, but couldn’t mend one corner that a mouse had nibbled.
She opened it toward the back, to a page with a black-and-white photograph. “It will make more sense going backwards. See? That’s me, long time ago. That’s my sister, there’s my mum, there’s Dad before he vanished. That’s how the house looked, sixty-odd years ago. Mum liked rounded shingles. Mum’s name was Brunhildegarde, as well.”
She turned to the previous page and an older photograph. “There’s Mum, with her mum and sisters. Grandmother Brunhildegarde had a secret recipe for spun-sugar arches. You can see one, there, in the background.”
She turned to the previous page. “Here’s Grandmother Brunhildegarde, with her parents. You can see that their gingerbread-trim was real gingerbread.”
She kept turning pages and introducing Tom to more generations of Brunhildegardes and the gingerbread house. Photographs turned to illustrations that, toward the beginning, were almost too faded to recognize. “That’s why I stay, Tom. There has been a gingerbread house, and a witch named Brunhildegarde, on this spot of land for four hundred twenty-three years. I don’t know what will happen to it, when I’m gone.”
“That’s really cool. Thanks for showing me,” Tom said. His forehead wrinkled up in thought. “The house has changed a lot,” he said. “All the Brun… um… all the ones before you… changed it a lot, made it theirs. But you just changed the shingles.”
Brinna shrugged. “I’m not much for design.”
“What did you want to do?” Tom asked, his forehead still wrinkled in thought. “When you were my age, what did you want to do?”
Brinna paused to consider. “I knew I’d stay here. I was the Brunhildegarde.”
“But what did you want to do? What do you want to do?”
Brinna was rather taken aback. “Well… I’ve always liked baking. I’ve always liked the big city. I might’ve studied to be a chef, maybe started a café of my own.”
Tom’s forehead unwrinkled. He grinned and kicked his feet happily against the chair legs. “I’ve got an idea. I know you don’t want to stay with us, but will you come to dinner? On Saturday, maybe?”
Brinna hesitated. Nothing in the rules, or in her own experience, proscribed how to handle friendly neighbors. “If it’s all right with your Gran and Grumps,” she answered.
“Great.” Tom smiled and stood up.
“Tom,” Brinna began, “you’ve asked a lot of questions today. May I ask you one?”
“Sure,” Tom replied.
“Why did you keep coming back?”
Tom hesitated, and his forehead wrinkled up again. “Because we’re the same, I guess. We’re both alone.”
Brinna raised her eyebrows. “Your Gran and Grumps take proper care of you, don’t they?”
Tom smiled, but it was a small, sad smile that had no business on a child’s face. “You don’t have to be by yourself to be alone,” he said. “See you Saturday.” And with that, he left.
Saturday came, and, while Brinna enjoyed the meal, she walked away with more food for thought.
After a couple of days, she called the developer who had been trying for the better part of two decades to buy her land and set an appointment to meet him and discuss conditions on Thursday.
Mr. Harold Dotsbrough, a down-to-earth fellow with gray hair cut short, arrived precisely on schedule. Brinna ushered him into the parlor. “Shall we discuss my conditions?” she asked.
Mr. Dotsbrough nodded warily—in years past, the conversation had dissolved into Brinna’s best maniacal laugh at this point. But this time was different.
“First, I want it named after this place,” Brinna began. “Gingerbread Circle, Gingerbread Lane, something like that. Second, I want the four plots with the enormous old pines turned into a community park. I know, that lowers what you’ll pay me for the land, but it increases the value of the community, and they’re the last bits of the old forest. The trees stay. And third, I’d like you to preserve the look of the place.”
Mr. Dotsbrough looked relieved. “Done, done, and we were planning that, anyway.” He pulled blueprints from his bag, designs for houses and townhomes. They looked very familiar. Mr. Dotsbrough continued, “Our architects used old photographs of this place for inspiration.”
Brinna nodded and smiled. “Then, as long as we can agree on a price, we have a deal.”
Even minus the land for the park, Mr. Dotsbrough’s offer still seemed generous to Brinna. She haggled it several thousand higher, just because she could. Two weeks later, the contract was signed, and the deal was closed.
Brinna bought a place downtown, with a shop downstairs and a flat upstairs. The roof did not have one single leak, and Brinna’s natural gas, stainless steel, professional-grade oven fit perfectly in the back of the shop. Tom’s Gran and Grumps helped Brinna navigate the maze of licenses and permits. In the evenings, while grown-ups discussed Brinna’s new business, Tom sat in a corner, writing everything down.
Two months later, Brinna’s Bites opened for business and was an immediate hit. The goth crowd raved over her décor. The health crowd adored her homeopathic remedies. Young children clamored for her candies. Busy businesspeople stopped by every afternoon for her pastries and coffee. And everyone who tried it loved her gingerbread. The very busiest time of year was around Christmas, when everyone for miles around wanted one of her fabulously ornate gingerbread houses to decorate their holiday tables. Only Brinna and Tom knew that each house was modeled after one generation or another of Brinna’s old gingerbread house.
One blustery evening that had the faintest hint of spring in the air, Brinna sat down with a mug of tea and a tired but very contented sigh. Tom, who had been sprawled across her new sofa (upholstered cushions were much more practical than nougat ones, Brinna had decided), sat up eagerly.
“All done?” he asked.
“For today,” Brinna replied with a grin. “Shouldn’t you be heading home for dinner?”
“Gran knows I’ll be late,” Tom replied. “I wanted to show you this.” He pulled an envelope out of his pack.
Brinna squinted. The envelope had a fancy seal on its front and looked as though it had been torn open with some gusto. Tom grinned sheepishly.
“I meant to wait and open it when the shop closed, but I couldn’t wait,” he explained. “You remember all that stuff I was writing down, about how we came up with Brinna’s Bites and what we all did to get it open and running?”
Brinna nodded. “I’d wondered what you were going to do with it all.”
“Well, I entered it in a contest for young entrepreneurs,” Tom continued. His face broke into a huge smile, and he practically bounced across the room to hand the letter to Brinna. “I won! I won it, Brinna!”
Brinna skimmed through the letter. “A full scholarship to Jeffries Memorial Preparatory Academy! Oh, Tom!” Brinna surprised herself by pulling the boy into a tight, grandmotherly hug.
Tom hugged her back. “It’s the best private school in the whole state,” he told Brinna. “I’ll start in the fall.”
Brinna surprised herself again by tearing up, just a tiny bit. “Does this mean you’ll be going away?”
Tom shook his head. “The school is here in the city. I’ll still come every time it rains.”
Brinna grinned. “I’ll have gingerbread waiting.”
Tom smiled and looked relieved. “I’m glad that won’t change.”
Some things did change when Tom started at his new school. He started wearing school uniforms. He studied even harder and rose to the top of his class. He found time to join an intramural sports team. Toward the end of his first year, he finally hit a growth spurt.
True to his word, no matter how busy he got, whenever it rained, he appeared like magic on Brinna’s doorstep, and Brinna always had gingerbread ready. As his second year began, he started bringing friends with him.
That winter, before the usual card from her sister arrived, Brinna decided to send some postcards, herself. On the front was printed a photograph of herself, Tom, Gran, Grumps, Tom’s friends, Brinna’s employees, and a good crowd of customers who wanted in on the fun. Each of them held their very own gingerbread house.
Brinna sent most of the cards to family and friends, but she kept one for herself and carefully pasted it on the last empty page of the album.
Heather Monson writes technical nonfiction for a living and writes fiction when her brain and fingers have words left in them at the end of the day. She also costumes, quilts, crochets, and takes very long walks. She lives in Utah with her husband and baby, and thinks the world of both of them.