"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
tried to concentrate on the difficult task before me. My reasoning, if
you could call it that, was hazy and confused.
"Well," I thought, opening the cash drawer and looking at the array of
five and one dollar bills, and fifty cent pieces and quarters, "they're
each paying half of five and a half. How much is half of five and a
half, anyway? Half of five would be two and a half, so half of five and
a half would be a little more than that. How much more? Well..." At
that point I lost the thread of the whole thing and had to begin over.
"Suppose," I thought, starting on a new tack, "I would give each of
them a dollar. That would mean they each had paid four dollars, which
would be too much. Well, then, suppose I gave them each three dollars.
That would mean they had each paid me two dollars, which wouldn't be
quite enough. But how much would it lack of being enough?"
Arithmetic had always stirred up a swirling fog inside my head. My
eyelids were drooping more and more, and yet I was beginning to feel
beneath my drowsiness a desperate panic. The men were growing impatient.
I frowned and stared more sternly at the money in the cash drawer. I
summoned all my powers of concentration. I handled the money in the
drawer ostentatiously, as a bluff, so that they would think I was
beginning to go into action.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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