We spent the remaining days of our vacation haunting real estate offices and discovering that there was nothing new and nice for less than thirty thousand down. We went back to Los Angeles, but we hadn't given up the idea of getting a motel. Every day for nearly a month, while Grant was working, I studied the classified sections of the papers and called real estate brokers. We even went to look at a few motels that were within our means, but they didn't seem to be worth the money--and, after the Moonrise, everything looked cheap and shabby and old. It was exactly a month after we had first seen the Moonrise that we left the children with Grandma and took another trip to Banning. Perhaps somewhere in that lovely little city, we thought, we might find another motel that would satisfy us--and that we could afford. But first, before driving around, we had to see the Moonrise again. Grant drove slowly as the Moonrise Motel came into view, and I looked wistfully out the window. The sun gleamed on the white stucco, and the bright green shutters were magnets to the eye. "Isn't it beautiful?" I asked sadly. "Look!" Grant exclaimed. "There's the manager, out digging weeds! Let's stop once and talk to him." Grant is of Holland Dutch ancestry, a fact which shows itself principally in his tendency to insert a "once" or a "quick" into as many of his sentences as possible. He doesn't fall back on the superfluous "yet's" and "already's" that sprinkle the speech of his relatives, but his method of expressing himself is rather quaint. (It was in a very quaint way, in fact, that he proposed to me. "Let's get married once," he said. I was so intrigued by his way of putting it that I agreed.) The manager of the motel took out a large, clean handkerchief and mopped his face and neck when we drove in. "You folks bought a motel yet?" he wanted to know. "Nope," Grant said. "We've been looking around, but we can't find anything we like as well as this." The stocky man wiped his face again, and I noticed that under the moisture of his skin there was a yellowish pallor. "Got to sell now," he said. "I'm sick; going to a sanitarium the minute I get this place off my hands. You can have it for sixty-three thousand, five hundred." "But the down payment ..." I said. "You got fifteen thousand?" Grant and I looked at each other. During the last month we had asked a real estate broker what we could get for our home, if we wanted to raise some money in a hurry. Eight thousand, he had told us. That, with the five we had saved, would make thirteen thousand. Our furniture should bring close to a thousand, and we could borrow the rest from Grandma. After six years, we were able to read each other's thoughts pretty well. "Yep, we could raise fifteen thousand," Grant told the motel manager. And that was the beginning.