"Ayah, I sure am, all right," she said. "Godfrey Mighty, he's got me doing it now--sticking a 'all right' on the end of everything. Sure, I'm going out with him again, you little stinkpot. If he's got all that dough, he might's well spend some of it on me. Just so Hellwig don't find out about it, damn it all."
"Grandma, please," I said. "You shouldn't swear over the phone. The operator might not like it."
"I didn't swear!" she exclaimed indignantly. "I just said, 'I hope Hellwig don't find out, darn it.'"
"That reminds me," I said, "How would you like it if I'd invite Hellwig up here for a weekend some time? I've been meaning to do it ever since we came here. He must get lonesome all alone there in his apartment."
"Ayah, he don't have brains enough to get married so's he wouldn't be alone," she interrupted. "You mean, you'd ask him to come sometime when it's my weekend to come there too?" she added doubtfully. "Plague take it all, just so they ain't no old man in one of your cabins that takes a shine to me--that'd make Hellwig pretty mad."
"Oh, don't worry about that. He can have a cabin all to himself, too--he won't have to pay anything for it, of course--and during the day you and he could walk around, maybe even get as far as the bottom of the mountains and start climbing them."
"Well, I guess he'd like that pretty well," she conceded.
David and Donna had always been normal, well-adjusted children, but my busyness with the motel, taking care of customers and the endless inevitable details connected with the business, led to a few minor behavior problems. The baby, soon after she learned to feed herself efficiently, went on a hunger strike. If a psychiatrist were to have one meal with us I am sure he would have it figured out that her sudden refusal to eat was her unconscious way of protesting against the fact that either Grant or I got up to answer the doorbell three or four times during every meal. I could see her point; sometimes I myself, after going on one of these little jaunts to rent cabins or to describe the service and the bill of fare of Moe's restaurant, for the benefit of doubting souls who weren't quite sure whether they should eat there or drive on downtown for a meal, felt like tossing my cooled food into the garbage can.
Anyway, Grant finally figured out a way to get Little Chief Hair-in-the-Face started eating again. Before each meal he captured a small black ant (either outdoors or on the sink, depending on the efficacy of our current ant poison) and imprisoned it on the tray of her high chair beneath her plate--a transparent glass plate, purchased especially for the experiment. Then, after allowing her one fascinated glimpse of the little creature, he filled her plate with food.
The first time that happened. Donna ate frantically, to get the food out of the way so that she could see the ant. After that, I expected the game to pall, but it never has. Since the first week or two Grant hasn't often put an ant under her plate, but she invariably cleans her plate, wipes off any remaining food particles with a piece of bread, and peers carefully through the glass. After all, she is obviously thinking, there might really be an ant this time! She has never tried, since the first day we played the game, to lift the plate and look under it. The first day, though, she was prepared to whisk the plate out of the way so that she could see what was going on under it. I brushed the forever-straggling brown hair out of her eyes and told her she must eat the food all gone--then she could see the ant.