WHEN BUSINESS SLOWS down for Banning motels due to the scarcity of tourists, it naturally slows down for the service stations and highway restaurants as well. Moe, the beak-nosed owner of the cafe next door, was very annoyed because business was so seasonal, and he decided to sell his place and take his family back to Los Angeles, where the demand for restaurant meals was more the same all year around, and where it wasn't necessary to comb the want ads and employment agencies for enough help part of the time, and the rest of the time to fire perfectly good employees because there wasn't any work for them to do. The day after Moe put up a big "For Sale by Owner" sign in front of his restaurant, he stopped in at the office, and told us the place was sold. He was holding the sign, which he had just taken down, in his thick fleshy hands. "Sold it just like that!" he exclaimed. "Fellow stopped in an hour ago, looked it over, liked it, and gave me a check for the full down payment. Just one catch--he insists on taking over right away tonight, even though we won't put it in escrow until Monday. I said okay, I didn't want to louse up the deal over a little thing like that. So me and the wife's going on a weekend trip, and he can run the darn thing all by himself." It was five o'clock on a Saturday afternoon then; by nine o'clock that night Moe was gone, the new owner had taken over, and big hand-made signs tacked up all over the outside of the restaurant announced: "Opening Night. Everything on the House! Come in and have fun!" People, in flocks and bevies and droves, were thronging into the place to see if the signs really meant what they said. Apparently they did, because the people who went in stayed in, and reinforcements kept pouring in behind them. Cars that were speeding along the highway stopped and spewed out occupants who only a few moments before had been intent upon faroff destinations. The habituees of the bar decided to see the fun, and the customers of all the surrounding motels, having heard rumors of the gala--and free--opening night, straggled toward the restaurant. I straggled toward it myself, after getting the children to bed and extracting a martyred statement from Grant to the effect that nope, of course he wouldn't mind in the least if I wanted to leave him all alone and go away and have fun without him. For moral support, I joined Mr. and Mrs. D'Aura, a quarrelsome couple who were celebrating their tenth anniversary with a short vacation in Banning. They had been renting one of our cabins for three days. From their attitude toward one another, it was hard to understand why they considered an anniversary an occasion for a celebration.