in Los Angeles--and told him that Grant would stop in to see him in a little over a week.
Every once in a while during the rest of that evening, I caught myself almost on the verge of tears. I tried to figure out what was the matter with me, and I realized that I was unhappy because I was afraid Grant would insist on selling the motel. I wanted to keep it, no matter how much we might be offered for it.
Still, I was glad Mr. Gorvane had made the offer. My relatives and the few of our closer friends to whom we had told the price we were paying for the motel had insisted that we were being fools, that the motel couldn't possibly be worth it; that the business about the owner being sick and having to sell was an old, old gag, that we'd lose every penny. I had never really doubted the wisdom of our course, but it was nice to have my faith in the value of our motel upheld. And if some one offered to buy it for seventy-five thousand the day after we took possession, probably in a couple of months, with the beginning of the season at Palm Springs, (a popular winter resort twenty miles from us) and the influx of winter tourists into California, we'd be offered even more.
After those two encounters, the edge wore off my customerphobia. I rented two more cabins before I went to bed. I checked carefully to be sure that all the neon lights were on. Then I locked the office door and the door that led outside from the living room, and lay down on the bed with my clothes on.
The scrunch of wheels on gravel brought me off the bed several times, but it turned out to be cars going into the restaurant next door. The beam of the headlights of cars turning around in the restaurant parking lot shone between the cracks of our Venetian blinds, casting stripes of light against the wall, and made me think cars were coming into our driveway.
There was no doubt, though, that the next car I heard was in our driveway. Besides the agitation of the gravel, there was a thud, and then loud, excited male voices.
I hurried to the door and looked out. A battered roadster, which had apparently come from Williams street along our private road and entered the graveled driveway from the rear, had banged up against the curb of one of the grass islands. Two young men in the roadster were arguing in a heated and highly alcoholic manner.
The idea of approaching two angry, unpredictable drunks didn't appeal to me, but I knew I couldn't let them stay there, making a disturbance that would be sure to annoy our customers. "Thish ish too the highway!" one of the men roared.
"No, it ish not! Thash the highway over there, where the lightsh are! You better let me drive, you're drunk, don't even know where the highway ish."
They struggled for a moment over possession of the steering wheel. Finally the one who had been driving said, "You're drunk yourshelf. Here, you better drive."
They traded seats, with painstaking clumsiness. Then they sat quietly for a moment, apparently about to go to sleep.
I was trying to coax my reluctant legs to carry me fiercely toward them when, to my relief, the new driver started the car and pulled out onto the highway. I hoped they would get safely wherever they were going.
At last I relaxed and went to sleep. Anyone who drove up wanting a cabin would ring the bell by the office door, anyway.
I couldn't have been asleep more than five minutes when the bell rang for the first time. I rented four more cabins during the night, each about an hour after the other. Nervousness and excitement kept me awake about half an hour after I rented each cabin, and I'd just be drifting into the sounder stages of sleep when the bell would ring again.
It wasn't a very restful night.
In the morning Mrs. Clark, the husky maid, came to work in the cabins. She was, in a bristling way, proud of her dark complexion and her Irish-Italian ancestry, and contemptuous of "them funny-lookin' foreigners that's always stayin' in your cabins," but she seemed to enjoy the work of cleaning the cabins, and did it with a zest and speed I could never have equaled. When I got the children fed and dressed and the baby in her playpen, I decided to tackle the mountainous heap of laundry. The laundry truck was due in a couple of hours; and I felt sure that, on the first day at least, it would take me almost as long to sort and count and list the dirty things as it would have to actually wash and iron them myself.
In the garages between cabins number 2 and 3 there were several strips of leftover linoleum standing against the back wall. I rolled these flat on the floor and brought armfuls of dirty linens from a compartment in the linen closet, putting them on one side. Then I sorted the things into six different piles--sheets, slips, hand towels, bath mats, wash cloths, bath towels. My arms began to ache from lifting each sheet and shaking it to be sure no smaller articles were wrapped up in it. Then I stuffed the sheets into a laundry bag, counting them carefully. There were sixty sheets, and I had to get a second laundry bag out of the linen closet.
The linen closet was a huge, roomy affair built against the back of the garage adjoining cabin 2, and it left plenty of room for a car in the garage. There were three gigantic shelves in it. On the bottom shelf were extra blankets and bedspreads, cleaning equipment of all kinds, and supplies such as soap, toilet paper, small boxes of matches, and water pitchers. On the middle shelf were stacks of clean linens--about two hundred of each item. On the top shelf we had stored as many of our personal belongings as we could get along without temporarily, since there was no room for them in our cabin.
I was exhausted by the time I had counted all the laundry, stuffed it into bags, and listed it in the laundry book. Just as I finished, the laundry truck roared into the driveway and stopped suddenly in front of the garage where I stood, gravel flying in all directions. The driver got out. He was a likeable, lanky, red-haired youth with a very few tiny patches of white skin showing between his freckles.
"How d'you like the motel business by now?" he asked me, as he lifted the heavy bags into the back of the truck.
"It's fun," I said, "all except cleaning cabins, and sorting laundry, and keeping books, and getting up in the night to rent cabins!"
He laughed, and rubbed his brown-speckled nose. "You'll get used to it," he said.
That night wasn't as bad as my first night alone had been. I rented five cabins before I went to bed, and I did it with so much nonchalance that I was proud of myself.
Once I got into bed, though, reaction from two days of worry and hard work and a night of very little sleep set in. I slept deeply, dreamlessly, without moving, until the shriek of the office bell shattered my sleep.
Dazedly I went into the office, snapped on the light, and unlocked the door. Two young men came in. "We want a cabin with two double beds," the taller man said.
He filled out the registration card which I shoved sleepily toward him. "How much?" he asked.
"Five-fifty," I replied. Our rate for a double cabin with two double beds was five and a half or six and a half dollars, depending on the number of people that were to occupy it. We had decided to charge that much or less, depending on the demand for cabins and the number of "vacancy" signs along the highway, following the custom of the former owners.
Each of the young men laid a five dollar bill on the counter. I looked at the bills groggily. I was still half asleep.
"Just one of those will do, with fifty cents beside," I said.
"We want to pay separately," said the shorter man. "Give us each change, please."
I missed Grant, with his quick mind and his easy competence, more intensely at that moment than I missed him yet. I smothered a yawn and
