WHEN BUSINESS SLOWS down for Banning motels due to the scarcity of
tourists, it naturally slows down for the service stations and highway
restaurants as well. Moe, the beak-nosed owner of the cafe next door,
was very annoyed because business was so seasonal, and he decided to
sell his place and take his family back to Los Angeles, where the
demand for restaurant meals was more the same all year around, and
where it wasn't necessary to comb the want ads and employment agencies
for enough help part of the time, and the rest of the time to fire
perfectly good employees because there wasn't any work for them to do.
The day after Moe put up a big "For Sale by Owner" sign in front of his
restaurant, he stopped in at the office, and told us the place was
sold. He was holding the sign, which he had just taken down, in his
thick fleshy hands.
"Sold it just like that!" he exclaimed. "Fellow stopped in an hour ago,
looked it over, liked it, and gave me a check for the full down
payment. Just one catch--he insists on taking over right away tonight,
even though we won't put it in escrow until Monday. I said okay, I
didn't want to louse up the deal over a little thing like that. So me
and the wife's going on a weekend trip, and he can run the darn thing
all by himself."
It was five o'clock on a Saturday afternoon then; by nine o'clock that
night Moe was gone, the new owner had taken over, and big hand-made
signs tacked up all over the outside of the restaurant announced:
"Opening Night. Everything on the House! Come in and have fun!"
People, in flocks and bevies and droves, were thronging into the place
to see if the signs really meant what they said. Apparently they did,
because the people who went in stayed in, and reinforcements kept
pouring in behind them. Cars that were speeding along the highway
stopped and spewed out occupants who only a few moments before had been
intent upon faroff destinations. The habituees of the bar decided to
see the fun, and the customers of all the surrounding motels, having
heard rumors of the gala--and free--opening night, straggled toward the
restaurant.
I straggled toward it myself, after getting the children to bed and
extracting a martyred statement from Grant to the effect that nope, of
course he wouldn't mind in the least if I wanted to leave him all alone
and go away and have fun without him. For moral support, I joined Mr.
and Mrs. D'Aura, a quarrelsome couple who were celebrating their tenth
anniversary with a short vacation in Banning. They had been renting one
of our cabins for three days. From their attitude toward one another,
it was hard to understand why they considered an anniversary an
occasion for a celebration.
They were a medium-sized, rather nondescript couple. His main claim to
distinction was the fact that nine or ten long coarse black hairs grew
out of the very tip of his nose; and the only things outstanding about
her were that her eyes did not seem to focus correctly or in unison,
and that she had extremely broad, well-padded hips.
The night they first rented the cabin, they were arguing about her
figure while he signed the registration card. "I tell you I've lost ten
pounds," she crackled.
"Yeah?" he asked, casting a skeptical glance over her. "Where?"
"If I knew where I lost it, it wouldn't be lost, would it?" she
snapped. "At least that's what you always say when you've lost
something."
He chortled while he finished filling out the registration card.
"Witty, ain't she?" he asked me. Reflectively he pulled the hairs on
the end of his nose while he searched his memory for his license
number. "She ain't much to look at, but she's smart, and she's got a
well-rounded personality." He laid the pen down and smacked her hard,
in the region of her lower back. "And that ain't all she's got that's
well-rounded, bless her heart!" he roared.
I wondered if she was going to let him get away with that. I should
have known that, being a woman, she'd have the last public word. She
did, and it was rather a subtle last word. "My attitude toward you,"
she said icily as they went out the door, "is that of nature toward a
vacuum."