Dawn's Book Read online

  “What smells so funny?” asked Daffodil.

  “My eyes sting,” complained Clover.

  I closed the door between the living room and the kitchen. “Let’s go, girls,” I said in a calm, authoritative voice. “We’re leaving the house right now.”

  They heard the seriousness in my voice and reached for my hands. I led them through the nearest safe exit — the kitchen door.

  We were walking quickly through their yard toward my backyard when Daffodil asked, “Is my house on fire?” Tears were gathering in her eyes.

  “Something’s making that smoke,” I said. “But I don’t know what.”

  Clover pulled on my hand and shrieked, “I want to go back and get my dolly!”

  I remembered that my purse was in the house, too. In it were pictures of my friends, my school identification card, and ten dollars. Before I could worry too much about my own stuff, I remembered that everything belonging to the Austins was in that house, including Mrs. Austin’s looms, her supplies, her finished pieces. Would everything connected with Mrs. Austin’s art career be destroyed?

  “We aren’t going back inside for anything,” I said firmly. “We’re going to my house.” I held tight to their hands and led them into my kitchen. My mother noticed us coming in and called from the living room, “Hi, girls. Glad you came by. I’ll be right there.” Before I even told my mother that the Austins’ house was on fire, I picked up the phone.

  “Are you going to call my mom and dad and tell them?” Daffodil asked.

  “I want to talk to Mommy,” Clover said.

  Both girls began to cry. I couldn’t blame them.

  I dialed 911. “First I have to call the fire department,” I told them.

  My mother came into the kitchen while I was talking to the 911 operator. She smiled at Clover and Daffodil and said, “I see you girls are having a fire drill, too.”

  I pointed out the kitchen window and my mother saw the smoke pouring out of the Austins’ kitchen door. She looked at me curiously, and I nodded as I gave the Austins’ address to the operator.

  When I finished that call I said to Clover and Daffodil, “Now we’ll call your mother and father and tell them about the smoke and that the fire department is coming.” I pulled the gallery business card out of my pocket and dialed the phone number printed at the bottom.

  While I was waiting for Mrs. Austin to come to the phone, I told my mother how we had smelled smoke in the kitchen. She ran to the living room to tell my father what was going on.

  I knew that the first thing to tell Mrs. Austin was that her children were okay. So when she came to the phone I said, “Mrs. Austin, it’s Dawn. Clover and Daffodil are at my house.”

  Before I could tell her about the smoke she said, “Dawn, I was frightened! When the gallery owner said I had a phone call I thought there was an emergency. I’m so relieved. Listen, as long as your folks don’t mind, it’s fine if the girls play at your place.”

  I didn’t want to upset Mrs. Austin, but I had to tell her that there was an emergency. “I brought them over here,” I said, “because I smelled smoke in your kitchen. I called the fire department.”

  I heard Mrs. Austin gasp. Then the wail of fire sirens racing up our block could be heard. “The fire trucks are already here,” I told her.

  “Are you sure the girls are okay?” Mrs. Austin asked. She was so frightened that she sounded out of breath.

  “Clover and Daffodil are standing right next to me,” I said.

  “Our house is on fire!” Daffodil yelled toward the phone.

  “Mommy, I want my dolly,” Clover cried.

  “Don’t let them go back in the house, Dawn,” Mrs. Austin said.

  “I won’t,” I promised.

  “We’ll be right there.” Mrs. Austin hung up the phone.

  By now my mother and father were in the kitchen with me and the girls. We ran out to the yard to watch their house.

  The firefighters broke the kitchen windows and black, billowing smoke poured out through the holes. A crowd of neighbors had gathered on the sidewalk in front of the house and firefighters were directing them to the other side of the street. Any second I expected that beautiful home to burst into flames as the pile of newspapers did in our backyard.

  The girls stood quietly on either side of me and held tightly to my hands. I talked to them in a calm, reassuring voice. First, I commented on how fast the firefighters had gotten there and how they knew just what to do to put out the fire. Then I reminded them that their mother and father were on their way home.

  A few minutes later the Austins’ car pulled into our driveway. Mr. Austin ran across the yard toward the firefighters while Mrs. Austin rushed to our house.

  She squatted down and embraced her girls, then looked up at me. Tears were streaming down her cheeks. “Thank you, Dawn,” she said. “Thank you so much.”

  A few minutes later Mr. Austin joined us. “The firefighters believe it was an electrical fire caused by faulty wiring,” he said. “The fire was confined to the kitchen. Everything else is okay.”

  “What about the looms and all my work?” Mrs. Austin whispered.

  “The door was closed between the kitchen and the living room,” he replied, “so your supplies and looms are okay.” I was glad I’d thought to close that door.

  “Is my dolly burned? And my dollhouse?” Clover asked.

  “The kitchen is a mess,” Mr. Austin told the girls, “but the rest of the house is just the way it was when you left it.” He smiled at me. “Thanks to Dawn.”

  Clover and Daffodil broke away from their parents to give me big hugs and thank yous.

  I was a hero on our street for the rest of the weekend, especially with the Austins. They sent me a dozen red roses with a card.

  On Monday, Sunny told our friends and teachers what I’d done. And a few days after that an article in the weekly paper described the fire at the Austins’ and how I’d gotten the children out of the house and called the fire department. The article included my name and my parents’ names.

  “Hey,” Jeff complained when my dad showed him the article, “how come my name’s not here? I’m her brother. Don’t I count?”

  “Sure you do,” I said. “But they just mention parents’ names for this kind of thing.”

  “If it were a longer article they would have talked about you, too,” my dad assured him.

  “I wish I’d been here for the fire,” Jeff said for about the millionth time in three days, “and not at that dumb old soccer game. We didn’t even win.”

  I was glad Jeff was the one who answered the phone the day the mayor’s office called me. “What’d they want?” he asked after I hung up the phone. “Did you talk to the mayor?”

  “I talked to the mayor’s assistant,” I told him. “He said that I’m one of this month’s community heroes.”

  “They’ll put your picture in the paper,” Jeff said.

  “Our whole family is invited to the ceremony at city hall next Saturday,” I went on. “We’ll meet the mayor.”

  Saturday morning we dressed in our best clothes for the ceremony. Jeff didn’t even complain about having to wear a tie.

  A young man was waiting for us in the lobby. “I’m Clyde Pearson,” he said. “You must be Dawn. We spoke on the phone.” While Mr. Pearson led us to the reception room I introduced him to the rest of my family.

  I was surprised to see a crowd of people in the reception room. Mr. Pearson had said that the medals were being awarded at a private ceremony and that only one other community hero was being honored that month. He introduced us to Mrs. Marjorie Hughes and explained that she was being honored for being a foster parent. “Mrs. Hughes raised children who didn’t have parents or relatives to take care of them,” he explained. “She’s been a mother to twenty children.”

  “Twenty kids!” Jeff exclaimed. “That’s like the Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe.”

  Mrs. Hughes laughed at that and told us that she hadn’t take
n care of them all at once. “The most I had at one time was six,” she said.

  “But as soon as one child was grown up and out of the house she’d take in another,” Mr. Pearson explained. “In forty years it added up to twenty kids. And every one of them went to college.”

  “Fourteen of them are here today,” Mrs. Hughes said proudly. “Some of them with spouses and their own children. They’ve already made me a grandmother seventeen times over. Five of those grandchildren are named after me.”

  I didn’t feel like I was such a big hero when I thought of all the work and love that Mrs. Hughes had given to her foster children. I had led two kids out of a house and made a phone call. This had taken about five minutes. Mrs. Hughes had cared for kids day in and day out for forty years.

  She was telling me how her children were taking her out for a special luncheon after the ceremony, when the mayor entered the room. The mayor was friendly and shook everybody’s hand. I could see that Jeff was particularly impressed by that.

  The mayor directed Mrs. Hughes and me to the front of the room to stand on either side of her at the podium. The people in the room became very quiet.

  The mayor talked about the history of the community hero medal and mentioned some people who had received it in the past. Then she made a nice speech about Mrs. Hughes and put the medal around her neck. Everyone in the room, except Mrs. Hughes, clapped. I felt honored to be given a medal in the same ceremony as Mrs. Hughes.

  Before the mayor hung the medal around my neck she described what I did during the fire at the Austins’. She ended her speech about me by saying, “Dawn Read Schafer, you acted wisely and bravely in a time of crisis. We are proud to have you as a citizen of Palo City.”

  I shook the mayor’s hand and said thank you.

  On the way home in the car my father joked that I’d probably drive them crazier than ever with fire drills.

  My mother said, “I’m glad that Dawn has made us more aware of fire prevention and safety. We should have put a fire extinguisher in the kitchen years ago.”

  Jeff whispered in my ear, “Let’s have a fire drill tonight. We’ll surprise Mom and Dad.”

  “Not tonight,” I whispered back. “We’ve had enough fire drills for awhile.”

  Oddly, I wasn’t as afraid of fires as I had been before the fire at the Austins’. For one thing I saw how quickly the fire department responded to a call. For another I knew that in an emergency I could remain calm and act sensibly. But mainly I didn’t think much about fires because my parents were fighting more than ever. Within a few weeks of the awards ceremony they told me they were separating.

  A fire could have destroyed our home and possessions. But my parents’ divorce destroyed our family. We would no longer be the family unit of Mom, Dad, Jeff, and Dawn. And there was nothing I could do about it. I couldn’t make out a checklist of things to do for Divorce Prevention in the Schafer Home. I had drilled my family on what to do in case of fire. But there was no way to prepare for what to do in case of divorce.

  Not long after I received the community hero medal I moved to Stoneybrook, Connecticut, a town on the other side of the country from the city that had honored me. I didn’t know then how many challenges I would face as I tried to adjust to a new life, or how much I would miss my old one.

  That year I moved from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic Ocean. I adjusted pretty well to the big changes in my life, mostly because of the Baby-sitters Club and my new best friend, Mary Anne Spier.

  The shameful incident I mentioned happened just a few months after I moved to Stoneybrook when I was still a new member of the Baby-sitters Club and before the wedding that made Mary Anne and me stepsisters.

  On a warm spring afternoon, I’d just finished a baby-sitting job for the Barretts and was on my way to a Baby-sitters Club meeting. It was the first warm sunny day after three cold and rainy ones. I wanted to take my time and enjoy the balmy spring weather, but I had to rush if I were going to be at the meeting when it started at five-thirty. The BSC president, Kristy Thomas, does not tolerate lateness.

  As I turned the corner onto Claudia’s block I saw Mary Anne ahead of me. I ran to catch up to her. “Isn’t this great?” I said, gesturing to the blue sky. “We finally have some decent weather.”

  “I love that it’s warm again,” Mary Anne replied.

  “Mary Anne, you would love the weather in Palo City,” I said. “We have one season — summer. It’s great.”

  “I’d miss the other seasons. I like them all. Even winter. Snow is so pretty.”

  I’d just endured my first New England winter and hated it.

  Fortunately the so-called “joys of winter” were the only things Mary Anne and I disagreed about. We were becoming best friends, especially now that my mother and her father were dating. Here’s what’s wonderful. Mary Anne and I figured out that my mother and her father were high school sweethearts. Their high school yearbooks, with romantic handwritten messages to one another, provided the clue. They’d gone their separate ways after high school and hadn’t seen or spoken to one another in years. But when they re-met (thanks to me and Mary Anne) they fell in love all over again.

  Mary Anne and I agreed that our parents were good for one another. I was glad my mother was happy living in Stoneybrook. I was pretty happy, too. I liked my new friends, especially Mary Anne. But I was homesick for California, and not just for the weather. I missed my friends and my old school. But mostly I missed Dad. Jeff felt the same way. A good chunk of our lives was missing, and there wasn’t any way we could get it back. You can’t see your dad on weekends when he lives three thousand miles away.

  I didn’t talk to Mary Anne about how much I missed my father. First of all, because she’s so sensitive and kind that she might just burst into tears over it. Secondly, because Mary Anne’s mother had died when Mary Anne was just a baby. I’d be seeing my father during the summer, but there was no way Mary Anne was ever going to see her mother again.

  Anyway, I was thinking about Dad as we climbed the stairs to Claudia’s room for the BSC meeting because I’d just been sitting for the Barrett kids — Buddy, Suzi, and Marnie. The Barretts were new clients. Mrs. Barrett had just divorced the children’s father and was having trouble managing everything on her own. Sitting at the Barretts’ usually meant picking up the house, bathing the kids, and feeding them. And those kids — especially Suzi and Buddy — were confused about the divorce. I knew how they felt from personal experience, so I could help them with that.

  When Mary Anne and I walked into Claudia’s room Kristy was already in her position of power, Claudia’s director’s chair. Kristy looked at us and then at the clock, which read 5:28, as if to say, “You were almost late.”

  “Hi, Kristy,” I said. “How’s it going?”

  “Good,” she answered in her let’s-get-down-to-business voice. “Mary Anne, the record book is on the bed. Dawn, why don’t you read the notebook.”

  I gave Claudia and Stacey a little wave.

  “Stacey, are you ready to collect the dues?” Kristy asked. Stacey held up the manila envelope she used for our weekly dues.

  At exactly five-thirty, Kristy said, “This Baby-sitters Club meeting will come to order. Stacey will collect the dues.”

  We forked over our money. “The total in the treasury is thirteen-fifty,” Stacey reported.

  “Does anyone need supplies for their Kid-Kits?” asked Kristy.

  I was about to say I needed a new set of Magic Markers for mine when the phone rang. “Hello, Baby-sitters Club,” Kristy said into the receiver.

  For the next twenty minutes we answered the phone and booked jobs. In between phone calls we discussed who needed what for their Kid-Kits.

  When that had been settled Kristy said, “Today I’m going over some basic rules of baby-sitting.”

  “We’ve done that a hundred times already,” Stacey said.

  “I don’t think Dawn ever wrote them down.” She looked at me. I shook my head no.
“It’s good for all of us to review these rules,” Kristy concluded.

  I wanted to remind Kristy that I’d been baby-sitting for a couple of years before I moved to Stoneybrook and became a member of the BSC. I even thought of reminding her that I’d been awarded the community hero medal because of my baby-sitting skills. But I kept my mouth shut and opened my notebook to write down Kristy’s version of the rules for baby-sitting.

  “Number one,” she began, “be sure emergency phone numbers are listed near the phone.”

  “Including the phone number for the nearest take-out pizza joint,” Stacey kidded.

  Kristy ignored Stacey’s comment, but the rest of us smiled at one another. Kristy continued. “Number two, have clear instructions on how to reach the parents while they are away from the house.”

  She looked in my direction to make sure I was writing the rules down. I was. “Number three,” she said, “Ask parents about the children’s meal and bedtimes. Also be sure you know any bedtime rituals.”

  “Rituals?” asked Claudia. “Like a séance or something?”

  Kristy glared at her.

  “I’m kidding, Kristy,” Claudia said. “It’s just that we know all this stuff.”

  “We are reviewing for Dawn,” Kristy said sharply. “Number four. Respect the privacy of your clients. Baby-sitters should not eavesdrop, snoop, or in any way violate the trust the client has placed in them.”

  “In other words, mind your own business,” Stacey concluded.

  “That’s another way to put it,” Kristy agreed.

  The phone rang. I picked up the receiver and said, “Hello, Baby-sitters Club.”

  “Hello,” a man’s voice said. “My wife and I heard about your club from Dr. Johanssen. We need a sitter for our seven-year-old daughter, Sandra, this Saturday evening. We’d like to try your service.”