I hurried into the office, where Grant, with a dazed expression, stood looking at a five dollar bill and a fifty-cent piece.
"Our first money from the motel," he said. "Shall we frame it?"
There was no door between the office and our living room. The whole interior of the cabin was lighted up by our neon sign. When we lay in bed we could see the desk in the office; and, conversely, people standing in the office would be able to see us.
Grant hung a filmy curtain over the doorway, fastening it at the top with thumb tacks. When the office light was on and the living room light was off, we discovered by experimentaion, it was possible to see from the living room into the office, but not the reverse.
That, I reflected as I lay in bed, would be very cozy. I'd be able to lie in bed and watch while people filled out registration cards (which would be a soothing agent to my rather abnormal curiosity)–but they wouldn't be able to see me. This seemed like the ultimate in privacy. And to have a real bed, a soft comfortable bed again, seemed the ultimate in luxury.
After we went to bed people began driving in, thick and fast. Grant had to hop out of bed so many times that finally he decided to stay up. He put on his robe and slippers and sat in a chair in the office doorway. I watched avidly as he rented cabins, admiring again the ease and sureness with which he did something he had never done before.
I had dozed off, in spite of the lumbering of trucks and the zipping of traffic along the highway. I felt someone shaking me. "Come and look once," Grant said.
I followed him sleepily and looked out the window where he pointed.
Our sign proclaimed, "No vacancy!"
"You mean they're all rented?" I cried.
"Every one. It's three o'clock; we rented them all in a little over three hours."
"How much did we take in?" I asked.
"Over sixty-five dollars," he said smugly. "I guess it's a good omen, the cabins being full the first night."
He got into bed and, with his customary annoying suddenness, fell asleep.
I was too excited to sleep. I padded happily around the room in my bare feet. I went into the children's bedroom to see if they were covered. The light from the highway, and the glow from neon signs, made the room so light that I could see them clearly.
David, as sound a sleeper as his daddy, was asleep and covered with a thin blanket. Donna was wide awake, motionless, her big blue eyes watching me fixedly behind the screen of hair that hung over her forehead, as I approached her crib. The traffic, the lack of her accustomed bedtime darkness, and the voices of people in the office, had apparently kept her awake ever since I put her to bed.
I patted her head, pulled the thin blanket snugly around her plump neck, and went back to bed. At five, awakened by the rumble of an unusually noisy truck, I went in again and looked at her. She was still gravely awake. I'm sure she didn't sleep at all that first night.
That ended her tendency to be a light sleeper, though. Since that first night she has slept as well as David.
Sunday is supposed to be a day of rest, but the next day was one Sunday when rest was the most remote possibility in the world for us. The people in our cabins were checking out one after the other, leaving their keys in the doors of the cabins or coming into the office and tossing them on the desk. (One man, leaving early, had got Grant out of bed at five-thirty just to hand him a key!)
Now, after a happy, exciting night of renting cabins, we were faced with the result–thirteen dirty cabins to be cleaned.
We had contacted Mrs. Clark, the strongly-built, dark-haired cleaning woman who did the work for the former owners, but she wasn't coming until Monday. She would work for us only every other day, because we were too low on funds to dare spend any on having work done that we could do ourselves.
I put the baby in her playpen, reminded David again not to play near the highway, and Grant and I set to work on the cabins. We were tired anyway after a day of moving and a night of very little sleep, and whenever I happened to catch a glimpse of myself in one of the little round mirrors that hung on the wall of each cabin as I worked, I was shocked. My thick, long hair was tangled and untidy, because of Banning's cooling but too incessant wind. My eyes looked sunken, and my face pale. (With so much work before me, I hadn't taken time to put on any makeup.) I tried to avoid looking in mirrors, because it made me feel twice as bad to realize how tired and bedraggled I looked.
Grant cleaned the bathrooms, scouring until every fixture shone, while I stripped the cabins of their dirty towels and sheets, brought clean ones, and made the beds. I emptied ash trays and wastebaskets and dusted while Grant vacuumed the floors. That may sound simple, but, multiplied by thirteen, it becomes drudgery. We plodded along, almost without hope that we would ever finish. Emptying and polishing the twentieth ashtray, I cursed the day that cigarettes had been invented. My hands grew rough and sore from tucking in so many sheets and blankets, slipping so many pillows into clean cases, and adjusting and smoothing so many spreads. My back ached. I began to wish I was in Los Angeles again. I wondered dully how I could ever have considered it work to clean up just one five-room house, with only two beds in it to be made.
Every once in a while I had to stop and see that the baby was all right. David helped by playing in our cabin near her playpen, so that she wouldn't get lonesome and begin to cry.
At lunchtime there was just one cabin left to clean. Grant said he'd clean that one, while I fixed lunch. I carried in clean sheets and pillowslips, hand towels, bath towels, wash cloths, and a bath mat, and went in to prepare lunch.
I was too tired to do anything but open a can of soup; we were both too tired to appreciate anything more elaborate, anyway.
Just one task remained for Grant before his return to Los Angeles–to put up David's tent, in the back yard. I hated to insist on his putting up the tent when he was so tired, but I knew that having the tent up back there would be the only thing that would keep David away from the front of the motel, occupied, and out of mischief. We had agreed to keep the children as invisible from the front of the motel as possible; the sight of children is too likely to suggest to travelers that here is a place where their cars and belongings might be tampered with, and where there will be so much noise that sleeping will be difficult.
About nine o'clock that night Grant went back to Los Angeles. He rented three of the cabins before he left, and we agreed on a method of keeping books.
Grant would come back each weekend and possibly once during each week, although to drive ninety miles each way just to be here for a few hours would hardly be worthwhile. He wouldn't quit his job until our income from the motel was consistently so good that we knew we'd be able to make our payments and repay Grandma.
I'd have all the renting to do, I'd have to supervise and help the cleaning woman, on alternate days I'd have to do all the cleaning; I'd have the two children to take care of, I'd be completely responsible for anything that might go wrong with the motel. The lights might all go off again, or the plumbing might get stopped up. I had visions of careless customers tossing towels and hairbrushes blithely down the toilets.
Many authors mention, when they want to portray intense feeling, that their heroine views a certain happening with "mixed emotions." Well, my emotions as I watched Grant drive off the gravel onto the highway weren't mixed in the least. They were all the same. I was scared to death.
CHAPTER THREE
FORTUNATELY I HAD the children in bed, where I didn't have to worry about them, when the next customer drove in. He was a brisk-looking, gray-haired man in a new coupe.
Often during my life I had heard people speak of "buck fever." It had seemed strange to me that any hunter should, at his first sight of a deer, tremble and shiver and find his fingers too numb and unresponsive to pull the trigger.
Now, though, I understood. With no capable, confident husband to talk to the man, I would have to do it myself.