They had lunch near Las Cruces, then dropped the children off at the house of some of their new friends, and went back to the Sageland Motel. It looked clean, bare and comfortable, had an efficiency kitchen and was thoroughly air-conditioned.
She smiled at him and said, “You seem a little disconcerted or something, Cal.”
“You don’t look and act enough like a damsel in distress, maybe.”
“I don’t want the distress. That’s where you come in. I’ve been burning bridges, Cal dear. I sold the house two weeks ago. Now I want to do something. It seems so plausible it... it scares me. I keep remembering that son of a gun, Johnny Dorran. Maybe he did me a favor, teaching me not to trust anybody. I don’t know. Anyway, I trust you, and you have a talent for dickering. You told me so.”
She wanted to buy a business. It was a short distance west of town on Routes 70 and 80. It was listed for sale with a local realtor. He drove out with her and looked at it. There were three hundred feet on the highway, and it was seven hundred feet deep. There was an adobe main house, with a gift shop attached, and two rental cottages. It was owned and operated by an elderly couple named Persons.
Mr. Persons came out to give them cordial greeting. He was a hunched, leathery old man with a wide tombstone smile, and he insisted on being called Dave. “So you’re the fella Miss Laura here was telling Ma and me about. Now you both come on in the front room and set. This here is a house that’ll never need air-conditioning, no sirree. Cool and dry in the summer, warm and dry in the wintertime, not that we get much winter, Mr. Burch. Feel how cool it is in here. Ma is taken poorly and she’s lying down in the back room and I know she’ll be sorry not to be up and around to say hello.
“Like I’ve been telling Miss Laura, Ma and me, we come from Kansas twenty-three years ago last month, and we built this little business up from scratch. Not that it’s any gold mine or anything like that, but we do rent the cottages regular, and on the gift items we got a good steady trade of folks stopping off the highway. The taxes are small, and the upkeep isn’t much, so you don’t actual have to take in too much to keep yourself going. Like I’ve been telling Miss Laura, we got a Mexican couple lives back there in a shack beyond our line, Gutierrez their name is, Joe and Ampara, and Joe he keeps the grounds up on account of my back troubling me, and Ampara she does maid work here in the big house and in the cottages for them that wants it, and they both work cheap.
“Reason we got to sell out, Mr. Burch, we’re plain getting too old to be alone and we got a daughter in San Diego has room for us and wants us and been after us two or three years to sell out. We both taken such a fancy to Miss Laura here. I’m telling you the truth, Mr. Burch, we’re giving her a better price on it than we figured on giving anybody, but it’s nice for us to know it will be in the hands of such a fine girl with her two dandy kids.
“She told me you’d probably be wanting to look at the books, seeing as how she can’t make head or tail out of them. I guess maybe nobody could. We just write stuff down in this kind of dime-store notebook I got here, the money that comes in on the righthand sheet and the money we pay out on the lefthand sheet. Trouble is, we put everything we pay out all together, whether it’s food for us or gas for my old car, so you’d have to kind of sort out the business things. Here’s the notebooks for the last three years, and you’re welcome to take them right on along with you and look them over and keep them long as you want.
“We want Miss Laura to be happy and satisfied. One thing we did do, when we decided on selling. We took an inventory of all the gift stuff and put it in this book here with the price we paid for it. And we put the house furnishings we’ll be leaving behind, because our daughter has a whole house full of furniture, and we won’t take along any more than I can get in the car and in the little cargo trailer I haul. Right here is the biggest amount of money in the gifts, this line of handmade Indian jewelry. Like I said, you take the records right along and you can study them up, Mr. Burch, but I’m telling you, we’re not about to come down any more on the price we set special for Miss Laura.
“My back is troubling me today, so you knowing where everything is, why don’t you take Mr. Burch around and show him the place, Miss Laura?”
An hour later, when they drove away, Laura was full of enthusiastic explanations. “I don’t know if you could see how charming that house could be, Cal, it’s so cluttered with junk. And so is the gift shop and so are the cottages. There’ll be a million things to get rid of, and I’ll have to work like a dog, but golly, I could make it all so attractive!”
“Taxes,” he said. “Zoning, water supply, sills, beams and roofs.”
“I’m going to think of some wonderful new name for it and design my own highway signs, and do something exciting in planting areas with those big bristly cactus.”
“Mark-up, credit rating, fire protection,” he said.
“There’s room for more cottages. Did you notice? And that gift shop. Isn’t it frightful? I’m going to dispose of all those tricks and jokes and pottery burros and concrete jackrabbits and put in some of the really fine local things you can get. Hand-woven fabrics, native pottery, handmade furniture.”
“Will this stretch of highway be bypassed? Will it be widened? What’s going to be built near you? Is the town expanding this way?”
She turned abruptly and stared at him. “Cal, you can certainly think of a lot of terrible things.”
“Somebody has to.”
“Three days after I decide, I can move in.”
“And you’ve always wanted to run a gift shop. I know.”
“Tell me I’m doing the right thing, Cal.”
“I can’t. Not yet. I hope I’ll be able to, though.”
She had gotten him a room at the Sageland Motel. That night, after dinner, he studied Persons’ records. On Wednesday he looked up the tax situation in Dona Ana County. He talked to the proprietors of three other gift shops in the area. He talked to the realtor. He talked to two builders, a plumbing contractor, a well driller, a state highway engineer. Wednesday evening she teased him to give her some opinion.
“Can’t do it, Lollie. Not until after I talk to Persons again. Alone.”
“But what are you going to say?”
“Just ask him a few things.”
“What kind of things? They’re such a sweet old couple.”
“Just a few little questions.”
“If you make him mad, he might not sell it to me, Cal.”
“I won’t make him mad.”
“And I can’t come with you?”
“Sorry.”
Thursday morning he drove Laura’s car out to Persons’ place. Mr. Persons jabbered all the way into the living room behind the gift shop. Cal met Mrs. Persons. She was a plump old party with a sweet vague smile.
Cal sat down in the living room, facing them, put the notebooks on the table beside his chair, smiled and said, “You two bandits ought to be ashamed of yourselves.”
Persons stared, gasped, sputtered. “What do you mean, coming in here like this and... and...”
“Settle down,” Cal said amiably. “You’re not talking to Mrs. Barnes. I can’t be charmed and I can’t be bluffed. I assume you want to sell out. I can either spoil your chances of selling to Mrs. Barnes, or I can work out some equitable deal.”
“But Miss Laura is real anxious to...”
“Miss Laura is real anxious not to waste her money. She can get a license to go into business. She can buy a piece of land a mile down the road at a reasonable figure, conditional on finding a good water supply. She can put up a very attractive place. She can do that or she can buy this.”