"Sure it has! But they don't know it. They take it for granted the
nights in Banning are just as hot as nights on the desert. They look
for 'air conditioning' signs, and they don't see one. We don't need air
conditioning, but people don't realize it. If we'd get air conditioning
once, and a big neon sign to let them know we've got it, they'd come
pouring in here all summer long."
With business slowing down, we resumed our old practice of renting
doubles as singles whenever it was necessary. If, after all our singles
were gone, a couple appeared who wanted a single, we locked the back
door of one of the doubles (so they wouldn't think they were getting
twin beds for the price of a single, and use both beds!) and rented
them the front room as a single. If it were a man alone, however, we
didn't bother locking off the back room, as there wasn't much danger
that one man would occupy more than one bed. Once, however, we got
fooled; after renting a double cabin to a man alone, we found in the
morning that both beds had been slept in. We never were able to decide
which was more likely--that he had gotten up in the night to go to the
bathroom and, becoming confused, had returned to the wrong bed; or that
he was an exceptionally delicate and finicky person whose esthetic
senses demanded a change of linen during the night.
We began getting "day sleepers" again--people who traveled the desert
by night, to avoid the intense heat, and came into the motel at dawn or
before to sleep in the daytime. We couldn't help laughing to ourselves
whenever such customers had small children in the car. We knew, even if
it hadn't occurred to them yet, that their children had been dozing in
the car all night, and would be refreshed and ready to greet the new
day with the leaps, yells, and fights that distinguish children from
the young of any other species. Any sleeping the adults might
accomplish during the daylight hours would be purely coincidental.
The bigger and healthier and noiser our own children grew, the more
cramped and tiny our living quarters seemed. Expansion, though,
appeared to be almost impossible. To expand in a northward direction,
by cutting a door in the wall of our living room that would lead into
cabin two, would be the simplest method of adding two rooms, but it
would also be very expensive, chopping down our income by about one
thirteenth. To expand south, to the front, would be illegal. All the
buildings for about half a mile on each side of us were set back sixty
feet from the highway, and none were permitted to be built closer to
the highway. To go west would be to protrude into the wide, inviting
driveway that was supposed to lure customers in, and would destroy the
symmetry of the motel. To go east, toward Featherbren's motel, would be
futile, since our land extended only four feet past the sides of the
buildings. "There are just two directions left," Grant said. "Down, and
up. A cellar, or a second story."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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