The Penderwicks at Last Read online

  ALSO BY JEANNE BIRDSALL

  The Penderwicks: A Summer Tale of Four Sisters, Two Rabbits, and a Very Interesting Boy

  The Penderwicks on Gardam Street

  The Penderwicks at Point Mouette

  The Penderwicks in Spring

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2018 by Jeanne Birdsall

  Cover art and interior illustrations copyright © 2018 by Yvonne Gilbert

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Visit us on the Web! rhcbooks.com

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at RHTeachersLibrarians.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  ISBN 9780385755665 (trade) — ISBN 9780385755672 (lib. bdg.) — ebook ISBN 9780385755689

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

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  For Michelle F. and Barbara S.K.

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Jeanne Birdsall

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One: Dancing at the Bus Stop

  Chapter Two: Rosalind’s News

  Chapter Three: Arundel

  Chapter Four: A Sheep Called Big Papi (or Blossom)

  Chapter Five: A Piano and a Bunch of Spiders

  Chapter Six: Even More Spiders

  Chapter Seven: Bobolinks

  Chapter Eight: Too Many Alice Books

  Chapter Nine: The Next Wave

  Chapter Ten: The Rock and the Red Shoe

  Chapter Eleven: Pins and Threats

  Chapter Twelve: The New Alien

  Chapter Thirteen: Music at Midnight

  Chapter Fourteen: Surprises

  Chapter Fifteen: The View from the Roof

  Chapter Sixteen: Hitch

  Chapter Seventeen: Death of an Alien

  Chapter Eighteen: The Wedding Veil

  Chapter Nineteen: Dancing in the Dark

  Chapter Twenty: Good-Byes

  Chapter Twenty-one: The Rest of the Family

  Chapter Twenty-two: An Ending

  Chapter Twenty-three: Another Beginning

  About the Author

  LYDIA BELIEVED IN DANCING wherever she could—on sidewalks, in supermarket aisles, libraries, swimming pools, parking lots. Today her stage was a bench at the bus stop. It was a challenge dancing on something so narrow, but Lydia took measures to keep from falling—small steps, no leaps, and heavy reliance on upper-body motion.

  “Music, Maestro!” she said. “What tempo, Miss Penderwick? I believe I’m in the mood for something snappy, Maestro. Snappy it is, then.”

  Lydia’s singing wasn’t up to her dancing, and her inner maestro’s humming was rarely on key, but the rhythm! Lydia and rhythm were as one while she bopped back and forth, being what her father called the Embodiment of Music. He’d come up with that when Lydia was too young to know what “embodiment” meant. She was now in fifth grade, though, and knew just about any words her father could come up with, as long as they were in English. (Sometimes he spoke in Latin.) Being the embodiment meant that she brought the spirit of music to life in her dancing.

  One last spin, and Lydia bowed, waiting for applause that wouldn’t come. There were no other people at the bus stop, and the Penderwick dogs weren’t paying attention. The older of the two, Sonata, was asleep under the bench. Sonata was often asleep—Lydia’s mother called her Zen Dog. The other dog, Feldspar, was Sonata’s son, with the same goofy bug eyes, but he was no Zen Dog. He considered life an opportunity for excitement, especially these two parts of life: Lydia’s older sister Batty and whatever he’d most recently found to carry around. Today it was a plastic clothes hanger.

  “Remember not to chew it up and swallow the pieces,” Lydia told him.

  Feldspar eyed her with disdain. He knew better than to do such a silly thing. Somewhere deep in his mixed-breed DNA was a bit of retriever, and retrievers never ate the spoils of the hunt, especially when the spoils were plastic and didn’t taste good. Just because he’d happened to accidentally eat one of Lydia’s headbands didn’t mean that his instincts were dead.

  Lydia checked the road for incoming buses. She and the dogs were waiting for the one that would deliver Batty, who studied music in Boston. In Lydia’s opinion, Batty didn’t come home often enough, and left too soon when she did—this time, she’d be gone at the end of the weekend. Of all the Penderwick siblings, Batty was the one who best understood Lydia and her dancing. Probably because Batty was a musician, a singer—they were both expressing music, but in different ways.

  With Batty away at college, only Lydia and her brother, Ben, were left at home with their parents. Ben was sixteen and cared primarily about watching and making movies with his best friend, Rafael. Sometimes they put Lydia in their movies. So far, she’d been a child genius murdered by her country’s enemies, a chess champion killed by her insane rival, and Joan of Arc burnt at the stake; in the current project, she was a sentient apple that would be eaten at the end of the film. Weary of dying for her brother’s art, Lydia wished he would find a new theme.

  There were three other sisters in the family, grown-ups in their twenties. Two of them, Rosalind and Jane, lived in apartments not too far from home and were always popping in and out. The third, Skye, was in California, working on her doctorate in astrophysics. She’d been out west since she’d first left for college—when Lydia was only four—and could get back home to Massachusetts only a few times a year. Lydia missed her greatly. Family lore had it that she’d been the first tiny baby Skye was drawn to. Skye denied it, saying that she hadn’t bothered much with Lydia until she was three and could speak some sense, but Lydia didn’t believe that. She was certain she could remember being swaddled, safe and warm, gazing up into Skye’s blue eyes.

  No bus yet, so time for another dance. For this one, Lydia chose to express great longing and beauty with languid gestures. She’d have to imagine the great longing, as she hadn’t experienced much of that, but beauty was all around her, in the daffodils abloom in the Ayvazians’ yard, across from the bus stop, and—Lydia thought, privately—in her very own hair. She had no pretensions to beauty, but she did have good hair: red, with just the right amount of curliness. It was her mother’s hair, and Ben’s. None of the other siblings had this hair, because they’d had a different mother, who’d died long before Lydia was born.

  As she brought her dance to an end, Feldspar began making the weird noise that his family politely called barking, though it was more a combination of whining and throat clearing. Anything else was impossible with your mouth full of a hanger. But he and Sonata had worked out a system—whenever Feldspar made that noise, Sonata chimed in with actual barking, so that together they made enough noise to accomplish whatever Feldspar had set out to do.

  That’s what happened no
w. Sonata woke up and raised her voice high, and Lydia jumped off the bench and took a firm hold on the dogs’ leashes. She’d learned long ago that they could sense Batty’s approach from afar. If they were clamoring, that meant Batty’s bus was about to come into view. And there it was, cresting the hill, steadily approaching with its precious cargo.

  When Batty got off the bus, beaming, as pleased to be home as her family would be to have her there, Lydia held back, knowing that the dogs were always greeted first. The dogs knew it, too, pressing against Batty, quivering with joy while she murmured her love to them and gently stroked them head to toe, reassuring herself that they were as happy and healthy as when she’d last seen them. Ben had once dubbed Batty the Saint Francis of Cameron—Cameron was the town where the Penderwicks lived—and no one had disputed him, except for Batty herself, who believed that it should be normal, not saintly, to have limitless love for animals.

  Only when this ritual was complete did Batty turn her attention to Lydia, checking her height, having her turn around to be seen from different angles, and gazing intently into her eyes.

  “You’ve grown since I was home last,” Batty said.

  “An eighth of an inch.” Lydia was proud of that eighth of an inch.

  “And school’s okay?”

  “We’re learning boring state capitals.”

  “We did, too, and the only one I can still remember is Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, because Henry kept getting in trouble for calling it Harrisburger. And Boston, of course.”

  Lydia reverted to what she was most interested in. “Sing for me? I’m trying out the flamenco.”

  Batty rifled through her vast inner library of songs. “I’ll go with a standard—‘Oye Como Va.’ ”

  She sang, and Lydia danced, just as they’d been doing for most of Lydia’s life. Some of her earliest memories were of prancing around the living room while Batty played the piano and sang. Lydia’s sisters liked to say that she could dance before she walked, but when Lydia tried to reason this out, it didn’t make sense. Today her flamenco was less than fiery—it needed several more years of practice, and shoes that weren’t sneakers would have been a big help—but it was awfully fun to do, and Batty even joined in for a few stomps and claps.

  “Excelente,” said Batty when they were done. “It’s good to be home.”

  They had to rouse Sonata—she’d dozed off in the middle of “Oye Como Va”—and headed up Gardam Street, slowly, giving the dogs the time they needed to revisit their favorite scents, and refresh them as needed.

  “Wesley’s talking again about dropping out of school to go west,” said Batty.

  “Oh, Batty, no!”

  Wesley was an art student Batty had met her first week at college, and had often brought home with her for visits. Lydia liked him more than any of Batty’s boyfriends from high school. Indeed, he was among her top four or five picks of all of her sisters’ boyfriends put together. She didn’t think it was just because he’d sketched her dancing, and that the sketch was now framed and hanging in the living room. No, there was also Wesley’s air of quiet mystery. Ben liked that about him, too, enough to suggest making a film with him as a secret agent. Lydia had advised Wesley not to accept, as the secret agent would be sure to die at the end of the film, but Wesley hadn’t needed her guidance. He wasn’t one for being watched—by a camera or a person—preferring instead to be the watcher.

  And then there was Wesley’s dog, Hitch, the three-legged Great Dane. When Lydia first fell under Hitch’s spell, she worried she was being unfaithful to Feldspar and Sonata. She asked her father if this was so, and he’d said that faithfulness had nothing to do with it—often we simply like people and animals better when they’re far away. He even gave her some Latin for it, but it was a particularly long phrase, and she could only remember a single word: absentes.

  “This is the third—no, fourth—time Wesley’s talked about dropping out of school,” said Batty. “And I understand. He’s got only a year left and says he’s not learning anything in his classes.”

  This Lydia believed. Wesley had told her about one project, to build an imaginary sculpture and live with it for a semester. She thought that would be more fun than state capitals, for example, but Wesley had been bored almost into a coma. He preferred making real things, with his hands.

  Batty added, “But this part about heading west is new. And he asked me if I’d go with him.”

  Lydia grabbed her sister’s arm, ready to keep her in Massachusetts by brute force if necessary. There was already a Penderwick sister on the West Coast. Two would be dreadful. “But you won’t, will you?”

  “No. I’m not leaving school for a boy, even if he is Wesley.”

  Lydia was pleased that Batty could resist Wesley, but wondered if it was as easy to resist Hitch. With that thought came the usual guilt about Lydia’s own dogs. “Absentes,” she whispered to herself, “absentes,” and tried not to notice that Feldspar was banging his hanger on a neighbor’s fence and that Sonata was yawning furiously at him, as though that would do any good.

  “Maybe Wesley will just keep talking about going west,” she said, “and never really go.”

  “No, I think he’ll go,” said Batty, “and I’m determined to protect my heart for when he does.”

  The sisters were almost to their house when a scruffy old car pulled up, one that should have fallen apart long ago. This was Jane’s—she didn’t have enough money for a nice car and didn’t care, anyway. She cared only about becoming a great novelist. Everything else was secondary, including love and romance. Those she’d sworn off after a few heartbreaks had used up too much of her writing time. In solidarity, Lydia and her friend Tzina had also sworn off love, though to no real effect, as neither had experienced love nor expected to. But the ceremony had been fun, with candles, dancing, and chanting. “Staaay away, love, stay, stay away. Staaay away, love, stay, stay away.”

  Another proof of Jane’s dedication to writing was her waitressing job. It was hard work, and Jane wasn’t particularly good at it, but it gave her money for rent and food, and enough time to work on her novel. Lydia was impressed with her sister’s single-minded pursuit of her craft and had great faith in her eventual success. Lydia also hoped to show up in one of Jane’s books someday. There had been no Lydia in her first two full-length books, abandoned when Jane decided they weren’t good enough. And so far, there wasn’t one in her current work-in-progress. Jane was probably waiting for a character fabulous enough to be named Lydia, who danced well enough to be an Embodiment of Music.

  Whenever Jane came directly from work, Feldspar and Sonata looked for spilled food on her clothes, and almost always found some. They thought she did it for their benefit, but the truth was that if a good idea for her novel popped up while she was serving food, the food tended to slide off its plate. Today the dogs were in luck, as they discovered when she got out of the car. Hummus, a big patch of it, on her skirt.

  “Another spill?” asked Batty.

  “Yes, but it was worth it. I realized I need to swap two chapters—the plot will work better that way.” Jane directed Sonata to a spot of spaghetti sauce on her sock. “This is nothing compared to the whipped-cream disaster when I figured out my art forger’s motivation. I looked like I’d just barely survived a snowstorm.”

  “But she still hasn’t dumped any food on the customers,” Lydia told Batty. “Only on herself.”

  “Knock on wood.” Jane couldn’t find any wood, so she knocked on Lydia’s head. “Hey, dogs, take a break while I hug Batty.”

  The dogs backed off during the hug but barged in again as soon as it was over, determined to get every last bit of food off Jane. They stopped only when Sonata found the peanut butter on the sole of her right shoe, and then there was nowhere else to look.

  “Rosalind’s still coming for dinner?” Batty asked Jane. “Do we know what
her news is yet?”

  “What news?” Lydia had heard nothing of any of this.

  “We don’t know,” said Jane. “We just know that Rosy has something to tell the family.”

  “But we have suspicions,” said Batty. “It might be the fruition of—you know.”

  “I don’t know!” said Lydia. The chain of communication from older Penderwicks to youngest often failed. “Is it about her wedding?”

  Rosalind was getting married this summer to Tommy Geiger, whom she’d been with forever. He’d grown up across the street and been a part of Lydia’s life for as long as she could remember. No one had been surprised when they decided to get married—the surprise would have been if they hadn’t.

  “We think so, but we’re not positive,” said Batty. “If we’re right, it’s not bad news. You don’t have to worry.”

  “No, not bad news, but it is interesting,” added Jane. “Lyds, go find Ben and tell him Batty’s home, okay?”

  While Lydia knew she was being gotten rid of so that her sisters could talk about Rosalind, she also knew that refusing to leave wouldn’t make them talk in front of her. Maybe Ben had more information. She went upstairs and knocked on his bedroom door. There was no answer, but she knew he was in there, because the door was locked. He always kept it locked when in residence, a habit he’d formed when Lydia was little and constantly trying to bust into his room. Or so he said. Lydia didn’t know why she would have been seeking out his company, even without knowing that when he was older, he would keep killing her in movies.

  “Ben, stop pretending you’re not in there. I won’t go away until you answer.” She knocked again. “Batty’s home and Jane’s here and Rosalind’s coming to dinner and has news. Did you know that?”