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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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