The office bell rang, and I left the men talking and went to answer it. A grey-colored, fat-cheeked man--a complete stranger to me--came breezing into the office.
"Hello, hello!" he cried. "Well, here I am back again! You didn't expect to see me again so soon, I'll bet!"
I forced a cordial smile. "No, I certainly didn't," I exclaimed, matching his tone.
This was an old, old refrain to me. The routine was so familiar to me I went into it automatically, straining my ears to catch any stray spicy bit from the living room. When the man asked if I could give him the same cabin again for that night, I said, "No, I'm sorry, but number 7 is already taken for tonight."
"Seven!" he exclaimed. "I had ten last time."
"You did? Well! I could have sworn we put you in 7. When you first came in I thought, 'Oh, oh, he's going to be disappointed that I can't give him 7 again!' We have so many people coming and going all the time, you know, I get mixed up sometimes about who has which cabin." And so on, ad nauseam, ad extreme boredom.
I slid a registration blank toward him, still acting as though I remembered him. Actually, though, as time goes on and we see more and more people, most of whom we have never seen before, it becomes harder and harder for us to recognize customers who have been here before--unless they come on several close-together occasions, or possess some unusual and striking characteristic; a white beard braided and tied with pink ribbons, for instance, or a tendency to stand with one leg draped across the desk while they fill out the registration card; or a pyramid of a hat which ends at the top in a bird's nest, complete with eggs and proud parent.
When I went back into the living room, Mr. Buxley was just taking his leave. "Those signs," he was saying, "read: 'We take your license number. If you leave something we send it to you. If you take something we send for you.' An' believe me, if one more towel gets stolen from my place, I'm going to buy some of those signs and put one up in every cabin."
We have been fortunate in that very few things have been stolen from our cabins. And the few people who do decide to steal something seldom set their sights on anything higher than a towel or two.
The Banning police, we discovered, are not willing to interrupt their checker games (or whatever it is that occupies their time in this peaceful little town) to recover anything so trivial as towels--even if they are notified of the theft while the culprits must still be in the vicinity. They can be freely quoted as saying, "That's one of the risks of being in the motel business. You've got to expect to lose a few towels now and then."