"My land, you know what a woman that's staying in one of your cabins
told me?" Grandma asked, looking up from a lapful of mending the day
after she met Miss Nestleburt. "She told me that a dream I had last
week, about a fire, meant I would soon be injured." Grandma held up one
finger, on the end of which glistened a tiny pinpoint of blood. "And
I'll be swear'n if I didn't prick myself just now, on this needle!
Ain't she good? Maybe she'll be able to tell me if I'm ever gonna marry
Hellwig! Ayah, she's just like a fortune teller--a sight better than
one, even! I never see anything like it!"
Something else Grandma "never see anything like" was the number and
variety of articles left behind in their cabins by our customers.
Nearly every morning we find something. We have a big box in which we
put them all, and there they stay until they are called for--which is
almost always never--or until their owners write, giving an address to
which to send the objects, and requesting that they be mailed. Usually
such requests are accompanied by a dollar for our trouble and for
postage. If every article left behind would cause one letter with a
dollar in it to be sent to us, we'd have a very nice little business on
the side, wrapping and mailing packages. Most of the things, though,
lie quietly forgotten, and accumulate. After about six months we paw
through the pajama tops, bottles of shaving lotion, slippers, garter
belts, cosmetic jars and hair nets, and salvage whatever we think we
can use. The rest we give to Mrs. Clark, who bears it triumphantly home
in the manner of a hunter returning with an elusive and long-sought
deer. What she ever manages to do with it all, I have never asked her.
To Grandma, the conglomeration of left-behind articles is "one H. of a
mess," and I am inclined to share her view.
Mr. Featherbrain's little motel, next door, didn't do very well for a
couple of months after it opened. It was in a bad spot, between us and
the Peacock. Whenever I went to the store across the street and looked
at it from that vantage point, I couldn't help thinking of a tiny,
pale, bashful man squeezed to insignificance between two fat, husky,
rouged and mascara-ed women. One day while I was waiting for Mr.
Bertram, the plump grocer, to finish making a sale to someone else, I
leaned back against the counter and gazed dreamily across the highway,
at our motel. (I never got over the thrill of pride I felt every time I
reminded myself that those beautiful buildings were ours--or would be,
when we had paid about fifty thousand dollars more on them!) The high,
mistily blue mountains rose behind the motel, reaching into the dimmer
blue of the sky.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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