Free The Penderwicks in Spring by Jeanne Birdsall

ideas, and as long as Rafael wasn’t there to encourage the wackier parts of his imagination, sometimes the ideas were decent.
    When she burst into the house, Iantha called out from the living room. “Is that you, Battikins?”
    Batty smoothed down her hair in an attempt to look less exuberant, and went in. Iantha was sitting cross-legged on the floor, using pins to mark the hem of the dress Jane was wearing, one that Jane had made herself. It was cotton, sprigged with tiny yellow and orange flowers, not particularly stylish but individual, a dress that an author might wear.
    “Yes, it’s me,” Batty answered. “You look nice in that dress, Jane.”
    “Thank you. I even designed it, believe it or not,” said Jane. “Wow, you look really happy. What’s happened?”
    “Nothing.” Batty tried looking less happy. This voice secret was going to be difficult to keep.
    “Turn, Jane,” said Iantha, and stuck a few more pins into Jane’s hem. “Batty, you do know that Jeffrey’s not coming, right?”
    “Ben told me. I’m very upset.” She tried to look like it.
    “But you look happy.” Jane was looking at her with what their father called her “writer’s gimlet eye.”
    Batty pinched her own leg to make her face look unhappy. If Jane decided that Batty’s emotions would make for good research, she’d be relentless in trying to figure out what they were.
    “Jane, turn,” said Iantha. “And stop trying to make Batty look not happy. Happy is good. And Jeffrey and Skye will work it out somehow.”
    “They have to, don’t they?” said Jane. “Skye can’t banish someone who belongs to all of us.”
    “Right, and turn again. Batty, do you want to come car-shopping? We’re leaving soon.”
    “No, thanks. I have—things to do.” She started out of the room. “Do you know where Ben is?”
    “Outside digging up rocks.”
    Batty went through the house, picking up a pad of paper and a pen as she went, and out the back door, where she found Ben attacking a new spot. He’d already dug up three interesting rocks, making himself filthy once again.
    “I’m sorry about before,” she told him.
    “I know it was you making that noise,” he said. “And it wasn’t your stomach.”
    “You’re right. I’m sorry.”
    “It wasn’t regular humming, like you usually do. It was like a fire engine siren. And then you pushed me.”
    “I was very rude, and I’m
sorry.
Good grief, Ben, please stop being mad.”
    He picked up one of his rocks and inspected it carefully. “I guess I could.”
    “You could? Because I have something to tell you.”Batty waited—he seemed to be listening. “I have to figure out how to make money.”
    Ben wasn’t sure how he felt about this. If Batty started making money, he and Lydia would be the only non-earners in the family. This was not a way he wanted to be linked with Lydia.
    “Why? Are you going to help pay for the new car?”
    “No, I need money for music stuff.” She hoped he wouldn’t ask what kind of music stuff, but he was still thinking about the car.
    “Maybe you could pay for a tire.” Ben thought it would be fun to own one of the tires on the new car. He could paint his name on the side. BEN BEN BEN BEN, rolling around and around.
    “Not even for a tire.”
    “Oh. Well,
how
are you going to make money?”
    “I’ll have a business called Penderwick Willing to Work.”
    “But what kind of work?”
    This was the problem, she told him, figuring out what work an almost eleven-year-old could do. Batty wished she was learning work skills at school, instead of clouds and exponents. Fixing shoes, for example, might not be a bad job. And she wouldn’t have to talk to strangers, except when they brought her the shoes. Even then, she wouldn’t have to look at their faces—just their feet.
    But Ben, as she’d hoped, wanted to help, and Batty put the pen and paper to use. Across the top shewrote
PWTW (Penderwick Willing to Work)
and then two ideas that had come to