"I guess we need kitchens," I said. I had known that all along, of course. When we first came here, when business was still good, we had turned away four or five would-be customers every day because they had wanted kitchens. Even now, with business so poor, hardly a day went by that one or two groups of people didn't ask us if we had kitchens. And most of those who required kitchens planned on staying anywhere from a week to three months--and were willing to pay the standard rate for cabins with kitchens: twenty-five dollars a week. Yes, six or eight kitchens would fix us up. Those would be rented all the time, and even in'the summer slump each year there'd be at least two or three new customers for the other cabins. And a year or two of being in business would begin to bring us an increased amount of repeat trade, so that we could look forward safely to a profitable business--if we could just hang onto the motel right now! We didn't have enough money to put in kitchens; each kitchen, we figured, even if Grant did all the labor himself, would cost four hundred dollars. They would have to be nice kitchens, to be in keeping with the cabins; ranges and refrigerators and steel cabinet sinks were expensive. Since it would be the second bedrooms in the double cabins that we would convert to kitchens, the carpeting would have to be replaced by linoleum, and the plastered walls redone, so that they would have a smooth, painted surface. Pipes would have to be connected. It would be a lot of work and a lot of expense, and we resolved not to consider beginning until early the following summer, before the next slump. In the meantime, something must be done. We had very little money in the bank; we owed nearly fifty thousand dollars on the motel, and two thousand to Grandma. Our income had become insignificant. Grant got a job digging ditches. That job was symbolic, I suppose, of the depths to which we had sunk. But it wasn't a regular ditch-digging job; he was working for a contractor, and the ditches were preparatory for construction work, on which Grant would be employed when it was begun. Those were hard days. Grant worked ten hours every day, and after work he came home and helped me finish whatever part of the motel work I had been unable to complete. We didn't dare to hire Mrs. Clark even occasionally, with business so poor. We did all the work ourselves, so that we wouldn't be spending an unnecessary penny. Not only were we working hard, but we weren't getting much sleep--we had to get up nights to rent cabins, and often a customer would request to be called at four or five or six the next morning, which meant setting the alarm for whatever hour he specified, crawling out of bed and plodding over to his cabin to knock on his door. We couldn't simply lend him the alarm clock, because we didn't dare be without it--there was always the possibility that another customer might want to be called.