Grant's salary, plus the low income from the motel, wasn't enough to make our payments and to take care of our laundry and utility bills. We had to draw on our tiny, dwindling reserve in the bank. We hoped that we would be able to hold out until Palm Springs opened, and the winter season got under way. Winter always brought travelers to the southern route, we knew, where they hoped to avoid the greater cold encountered along the northern route. The slackening off of the good season, in the early summer, is due to the understandable desire of many tourists to avoid the desert heat. And the "summer slump" that Featherbrain had forecast, with a knowledge born of previous summer visits to Banning, was due also to the fact that school and business vacations were over, and travelers were getting back to their offices and factories, and sending their children back to school. The few customers who did stay at our motel during this slump came usually very late at night--or, rather, early in the morning. Two, three, and four were common hours for our office bell to startle us out of sleep. Now that Grant was working, I shared with him the unpleasant duty of getting up in the night to go to the door. The circles under our eyes were a little darker every morning. Just getting up out of a sound sleep to rent a cabin was bad enough, but often we'd have a customer inconsiderate enough to mention that he'd be back "in ten minutes, soon as he'd washed his face", to use the telephone. So whichever of us had gotten up to rent him a cabin would have to stay up, since it wouldn't be worthwhile to go back to bed for only ten minutes. More often than not, too, the ten minutes would stretch into half an hour or more, or the customer would forget about the phone call and not come back at all. If the one of us who was up went back to bed, though, after half an hour or so of fruitless waiting, the jangle of the bell almost invariably dragged us up again out of the just-attained depths of sleep, and the customer, "so sorry he had kept us up," came in to make his phone call. The majority of customers, of course, are very considerate, however. In fact, so many of those who came late at night or toward morning were profuse in their apologies for waking us, that Grant began to ponder. "If the ones who do come late hate it so much to wake us up, then there must be a lot who quick pass us by because they don't want to wake us." We were sitting at the kitchen table, having a council of war. The children were in bed. Grant spread mustard thoughtfully on a cracker, and sprinkled sugar over the top. "If we had the light on inside the office, and people could see that someone was up, then they wouldn't have to worry that they'd be getting anyone out of bed, and they wouldn't be afraid to come in." He crunched his cracker, while I watched with the horrified fascination his strange tastes still inspired in me, even after six years.