Dawn and the Impossible Three (9 page)

Mrs. Barrett and I were sitting on the Barretts' back porch. It wasn't Mr. Barrett's day to spend time with Buddy, Suzi, and Marnie, but Mrs. Barrett had suggested that he take them — considering the mess she had caused the day before.

The house was quiet. I had never heard it so quiet. No running feet or yelling voices or crashing toys. Mrs. Barrett had served us glasses of iced tea and had brought out a plate of cookies.

We both added sugar to our tea, stirred it, and took a sip.

“So, Dawn,” said Mrs. Barrett, “what is it you wanted to talk about?”

I put my iced tea down and drew in a deep breath. “Mrs. Barrett,” I said, “I really like Buddy and Suzi and Marnie, but I can't baby-sit for them anymore.”

Mrs. Barrett looked at me in dismay. “You
can't
? Why not?”

“Because of what happened yesterday.”

“Mr. Barrett? But we're going to straighten our problems out. We're going to talk to our lawyers just like the police suggested, and maybe a counselor, too. You won't have any more problems with my ex-husband.”

“That's not really what I meant,” I replied. “The problem is …” How did I tell Mrs. Barrett the problem was
her
? “The problem is that I've had a lot of trouble because of mistakes that … mistakes-you've-made,” I said in a rush.

Mrs. Barrett knitted her eyebrows. I couldn't blame her. After all, I was just a twelve-year-old kid, and I was telling her she was careless.

“I'm really sorry,” I said, “but I can't be a good baby-sitter unless the parents give me a little help. I don't know your children as well as you do. I need you to tell me things about them — like whether they have allergies. And I have to know where you are while I'm in charge. If you're doing errands, that's one thing, but when you go someplace in particular, I need to have the phone number.”

“The right phone number,” Mrs. Barrett added thoughtfully, and I knew she was thinking about Hurley's Garage.

“Yes,” I said. “But it's even more than that.

I need … I need some organization. And I can't do all your housework anymore. And yesterday was very scary. And you know what else? Buddy and Suzi are starting to depend on me — a lot. Buddy comes to me with school problems now. Suzi calls me on the phone. Sometimes she doesn't really know what to say, but other times she's tattling on Buddy or telling me about something that's gone wrong. I love Buddy and Suzi, Mrs. Barrett. Marnie, too. But I think they should be going to you more. I mean,
you're
their mother. Not me.”

Mrs. Barrett didn't say anything. She just stared at me. She was looking as beautiful as usual — all cool and fresh, with her long, slim legs crossed in front of her. Mrs. Barrett was gorgeous. She always looked so together. But her house didn't and her kids didn't. And I had decided that not only was baby-sitting for them too risky and too much work, it wasn't even good for the Barretts. I wasn't helping them. I was just allowing Mrs. Barrett to go on being rushed and disorganized. As long as I was around to take care of things, then Mrs. Barrett didn't have to take care of them herself.

Since Mrs. Barrett wasn't saying anything, I stood up. “I'm sorry,” I said. “That's why I can't sit for you anymore. Your kids need
you
, not a baby-sitter. I talked this over with the Baby-sitters
Club, and they agree with me. The other members think I'm doing the right thing.”

Mrs. Barrett suddenly found her voice. “Oh, Dawn, please. Just a minute. Don't go. You're the best sitter I've ever found. The children
adore
you. They talk about you all the time. I think they'd be very hurt if you stopped sitting for them.”

“Well, I'll still come visit them sometimes. And I'll see them in the neighborhood when I'm baby-sitting at the Pikes' or the Prezziosos'.”

“Couldn't we work something out?” Mrs. Barrett asked.

“Like what?”

“How about if I asked you to come by ten or fifteen minutes earlier than I actually need you? That way we'd have time to talk before I leave. I could give you phone numbers and information. You could ask questions.”

“Well …”

“And I'll try to keep the house in better shape.”

“You know, Buddy and Suzi can help you with that,” I told her. “They help me all the time. They're getting good at it.”

“Maybe,” Mrs. Barrett went on, “if you did decide to sit for us, I could leave you specific chores to do sometimes and pay you extra for them. That seems fairer.”

“Well …”

“Would you reconsider, Dawn?”

I thought for a moment. At last I said, “How about a trial? I'll baby-sit for you three more times and we'll see how things go.”

“It's a deal,” said Mrs. Barrett. She stuck out her hand and we shook on it. Then we finished our iced tea and had a very nice time talking about Buddy and Suzi and Marnie.

At the next meeting of the Baby-sitters Club, I told my friends what had happened when I talked to Mrs. Barrett. They thought I'd been very brave to have the talk in the first place.

“And so,” I said as I finished up the story, “I think it was all right to agree to sit for them again. After all, it's just for a trial period.”

“I think it was okay, too,” said Kristy. “It was reasonable. And we don't want to give the Babysitters Club a bad name by being unfair. It was good that you compromised.”

Lately Kristy almost always agreed with me. Not when she didn't really mean it, of course. But she
used
to disagree with me on everything, just so she could pick a fight.

“How are the Barrett kids doing anyway?” asked Mary Anne. “I mean since Saturday.”

“They're fine,” I said. “Marnie never really knew anything was wrong, of course. And Suzi spent most of that afternoon with Mallory Pike. Mallory is really good with little kids.”

“I guess because of all her brothers and sisters,” said Stacey.

“She'll make a good baby-sitter,” added Claudia.

“Maybe one day the Baby-sitters Club will be a huge organization,” I said dreamily, “and Mallory will be part of it.” I smiled at the thought. “Anyway, Buddy's okay, too. A little confused, I guess, but his parents have explained to him that although they do have some problems, they're trying to work them out.”

“The thought of parents kidnapping their own children is scary,” said Claudia.

“Yeah,” said Kristy. “I wonder if my dad would ever do that to my brothers and me. Or what if he just took David Michael — and we never saw him again? How awful.” Kristy shivered.

I did, too. If my father kidnapped me, would I want to go back to California now? I wasn't sure. Although if he did kidnap me, I guess we couldn't go back to California. We would have to go someplace where no one would think to look
for us. Like Alaska. I definitely did not want to do that. Anyway, Connecticut isn't so bad when you get used to it.

I looked around at the members of the Babysitters Club — my friends. We were sprawled all over Claudia's room. Mary Anne and I were lying side by side across her bed on our stomachs. Kristy was slumped thoughtfully in the director's chair, and Stacey and Claudia were sitting on the floor. All of us, except for Stacey, were eating candy Gummi Worms that Claudia had stashed in a pencil case in her desk drawer.

The phone rang.

I picked it up while Mary Anne poised her pen over the appointment book. “Hello, Babysitters Club,” I said.

“Hi, Dawn. It's me, Buddy.”

“Hi, Buddy,” I replied. I raised my eyebrows at the girls as if to say, “What now?”

“You know what happened in school today? All I did was drop my pencil on Steve's desk and my teacher goes, ‘Okay, Buddy, no recess for you.' “

A thousand questions popped into my mind like, Did you
throw
your pencil on Steve's desk or did you really just drop it? How many times had you already dropped your pencil on Steve's
desk? But instead I asked, “Buddy, is your mom home?”

“Yes.”

“I think you should tell
her
about this. She'll help you decide what to do. She's good at that.”

“Not as good as you.”

“Give her a try, Buddy,” I said. “But you know what you can tell me? You can tell me if anything funny happened at school today.”

“Well,” said Buddy slowly. “Ashley Vaughn's lunch fell out the window.”

“That's pretty funny,” I told him, laughing. “Okay, I've got to get off the phone now.” (Kristy was shooting looks at me because we're not supposed to have personal phone conversations during the meetings.) “Talk to your mother tonight, Buddy, and tomorrow when I baby-sit you can tell me what she said.”

“All right,” he agreed.

We hung up.

The members of the Baby-sitters Club discussed business for a few minutes. Then Kristy cleared her throat and got to her feet.

Something was about to happen. I could tell. Mary Anne and I sat up, and Stacey and Claudia stopped fooling around with the Gummi Worms and looked at Kristy.

“You guys,” Kristy began, “I've been thinking over this problem of what to do about the club after I move. I know we have all summer before that happens, but I can't help worrying about it. And I've come to a decision.”

I turned to Mary Anne in horror. Suddenly I was sure —
sure
— that Kristy was going to break up the club. I could feel tears pricking at my eyes. I looked down so that no one would see me cry.

“My decision is to raise our club dues.”

My head snapped up in surprise. “Raise our dues? Why?” I asked.

“Because the only solution I can think of is to pay someone to drive me to and from the club meetings. Not a cabdriver — that's much too expensive — but someone who'd like to earn a little money. It would be an easy job, and for someone young who's just learned to drive —”

“Charlie!” cried Mary Anne suddenly. Charlie is Kristy's older brother. “Charlie will be able to drive then, won't he? Oh, Kristy, that's a wonderful idea! He'll be dying for excuses to use the car.”

“But do you mind paying for it out of our dues?” she asked us. “It seems like a club expense to me, since I
am
the president and I have to be at the meetings, but —”

“No, it's the perfect solution!” I agreed.

“Perfect!” echoed Stacey and Claudia.

Whew. What a load off everybody's minds.

Two days later, a “surprise” visitor came to one of our club meetings. It was my brother, Jeff, and the only person he was a real surprise to was Mary Anne. The rest of us had asked him to come over with the new camera my dad had sent him. Kristy and I had had an idea. Mary Anne was almost finished redecorating her room. (She even had a new rug, a new bedspread, and newly painted walls, courtesy of her father, who was becoming less and less tight with pennies and dollars.) But she didn't have the one thing she'd been talking about ever since she started the project — a framed photo of the members of the club.

The day Jeff came over, Kristy, Claudia, Stacey, and I went to the meeting very carefully dressed. (We knew Mary Anne would look nice, because she always does.) When we told Mary Anne why Jeff was there, she burst into tears. But she dried them quickly.

“Okay, everybody, why don't you pose on the bed,” suggested Jeff.

So we did. Claudia, Stacey, and I kneeled against the wall and Kristy and Mary Anne sat in front of us.

“Smile!” said Jeff.

We grinned. Mary Anne grinned the hardest.
Click, click
went the camera. And the five members of the Baby-sitters Club were captured forever.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ANN MATTHEWS MARTIN
was born on August 12, 1955. She grew up in Princeton, New Jersey, with her parents and her younger sister, Jane. There are currently over 176 million copies of The Baby-sitters Club in print. (If you stacked all of these books up, the pile would be 21,245 miles high.)

In addition to The Baby-sitters Club, Ann is the author of two other series, Main Street and Family Tree. Her novels include
Belle Teal
,
A Corner of the Universe
(a Newbery Honor book),
Here Today
,
A Dog's Life
,
On Christmas Eve
,
Everything for a Dog
,
Ten Rules for Living with My Sister
, and
Ten Good and Bad Things About My Life (So Far)
. She is also the coauthor, with Laura Godwin, of the Doll People series.

Ann lives in upstate New York with her dog and her cats.