During the winter, when we were turning away twenty or thirty cars a day, we had often commented that it was too bad there was no way of preserving some of this surplus for the lean summer months ahead. My pet idea had been to put all the extra winter applicants for cabins into a gigantic refrigerator, thus preserving them on ice until we were ready to use them. Now that we were having vacancies again, we could open the door of the huge refrigerator each day, take out the desired number of customers, and fill our cabins up.
Grant wasn't amused by such whimsy, though. To him, life was real, life was earnest; and the fact that we still owed forty-five thousand dollars on the motel, payable at seven hundred dollars a month, customers or no customers, might have had something to do with it.
I refused to do any more worrying. We had paid off all that we had borrowed to make the down payment on the place, and in the lush winter months we had saved enough to carry us through till the next winter if we didn't take in another cent until then. And business now was bad only by comparison to winter's business; actually, if we took in every month of the year what our present monthly average was, we'd be paying off the mortgage rapidly and having money to spare.
"Air conditioning . . . that's the answer," Grant said one night as I was getting into bed. He sat down on the foot of the bed, drumming his fingers against his knee. He was eating a thick sandwich, and I delicately looked away from the conglomeration of its ingredients.
"The answer to what?" I asked.
"Business. Not one motel in Banning has air conditioning."
"They don't need it. That perpetual wind keeps the place cooled off. 'Air-conditioned by Nature.' That would be a good slogan for one of your advertising signs, wouldn't it?"
"Uh," he said absently. "Mm--hmm. What's the first thing people think of when they get in off the hot desert?"
"A glass of beer?" I asked drowsily
"Of course not! A cool place to sleep."