He fingered one huge ear, and I saw the glitter of a diamond on his finger. "Let's let me look at it, first. Then I make you offer."
I showed some of the empty cabins to him and his wife, a meek little woman who clambered out of their car and trailed along after us. I led them out to the land behind the back row of courts. It was just a gigantic splotch of blackness at this time of night, but I described it to them. They were very much impressed.
When we were back in the office Mr. Gorvane--for he had introduced himself by now--said, "I been looking around, this is nicest court in Banning. I wanna it to belong to me. I offer you seventy-five thousand."
I gasped. By selling, we would make eleven and a half thousand dollars profit. That was a lot of money, especially considering the short length of time involved.
I promised him I would talk it over with my husband the following weekend. I took his address--he lived in Los Angeles--and told him that Grant would stop in to see him in a little over a week.
Every once in a while during the rest of that evening, I caught myself almost on the verge of tears. I tried to figure out what was the matter with me, and I realized that I was unhappy because I was afraid Grant would insist on selling the motel. I wanted to keep it, no matter how much we might be offered for it.
Still, I was glad Mr. Gorvane had made the offer. My relatives and the few of our closer friends to whom we had told the price we were paying for the motel had insisted that we were being fools, that the motel couldn't possibly be worth it; that the business about the owner being sick and having to sell was an old, old gag, that we'd lose every penny. I had never really doubted the wisdom of our course, but it was nice to have my faith in the value of our motel upheld. And if some one offered to buy it for seventy-five thousand the day after we took possession, probably in a couple of months, with the beginning of the season at Palm Springs, (a popular winter resort twenty miles from us) and the influx of winter tourists into California, we'd be offered even more.
After those two encounters, the edge wore off my customerphobia. I rented two more cabins before I went to bed. I checked carefully to be sure that all the neon lights were on. Then I locked the office door and the door that led outside from the living room, and lay down on the bed with my clothes on.
The scrunch of wheels on gravel brought me off the bed several times, but it turned out to be cars going into the restaurant next door. The beam of the headlights of cars turning around in the restaurant parking lot shone between the cracks of our Venetian blinds, casting stripes of light against the wall, and made me think cars were coming into our driveway.
There was no doubt, though, that the next car I heard was in our driveway. Besides the agitation of the gravel, there was a thud, and then loud, excited male voices.