C Box - In Plain Sight

“Your dad looked cool,” Sheridan said.

Julie nodded. “He can be,” she said simply.

“But you live here with your uncle.”

“I moved to be with my grandmother and my mom.” Julie shrugged. “But my grandma, well, you know… she’s gone.”

AS SHE SAT across from Julie at the massive table that at one time fed twenty “strapping ranch hands,” as Arlen put it, Sheridan felt as if she were in a place and with people who shared a mutual faded glory that she wasn’t a part of.

She tried not to stare at Arlen or Wyatt as they ate, but she did observe them carefully. Wyatt tore into his food as if he were a starved animal. He pistoned forkfuls of food into his mouth with a mechanical fury, as if he couldn’t wait to complete his meal and punch off the clock. Arlen was leisurely, urbane, continuously refilling his wineglass before it was empty.

Julie appeared to be oblivious to both of them, picking at her food. She seemed put out by something. She kept stealing glances at Sheridan, and Sheridan had the feeling she was somehow disappointing her friend.

Sheridan was uncomfortable. It wasn’t the food, which was very good: steak, salad, fresh hot rolls with butter, garlic mashed potatoes, apple cobbler for dessert. Uncle Arlen was a great cook, and he told both girls so repeatedly.

It was interesting when Julie’s mother, Doris, returned from the kitchen with a plate filled with the cookies Julie and Sheridan had baked. As she served Sheridan, Doris leaned down and spoke in a tone so low the others at the table couldn’t hear her.

“This place used to weird me out as well,” she said. “But you eventually get used to it.”

Sheridan nodded but didn’t meet her eyes.

BEFORE THEY WATCHED a DVD movie and went to bed, Uncle Arlen told them stories with a fire crackling in the fireplace. He was a good storyteller. He knew how to use words and inflection and would look right into Sheridan’s eyes as he made a point, as if it were the most important thing in the world that she hear him and hear him now.

Sheridan had been seated next to Julie on a bear rug at Arlen’s feet. The way Julie walked over, collapsed on the rug, and turned her immediate attention to her uncle suggested to Sheridan this Story Time was a very common occurrence.

“Tell about Grandpa Homer,” Julie had asked her uncle. And he complied. About how Homer had to confront a bear (“You’re sitting on it,” Arlen said). How he fought with the Indians. When Homer stood up to the ranch hands-there were dozens of cowboys living on the ranch back then-and told them either to get out or shape up when they threatened to walk off the job unless they got more pay and better food.

To hear Arlen tell it, the Scarlett family had been involved in everything that had ever happened in the valley, and in Twelve Sleep County, Wyoming. While haughty newcomers either tried to overreach and failed or panicked and ran, the Scarletts provided the grounding force. When locals ran around like “chickens with their heads cut off” about a drought, fire season, flash floods, or the fact that the world seemed to have passed Saddlestring by, the Scarletts were there to provide context, experience, and wisdom. Sheridan was aware of how Julie kept looking over at her as Arlen talked, as if to say, “See how lucky you are that I’m sharing this with you?”

Arlen called it “oral history,” and said he repeated the stories to Julie over the years so she could continue the tradition when she got older. “It’s sad that families don’t hand down stories anymore,” Arlen said. Then, shaking his head and clucking, he said, “Of course, maybe they don’t have much to tell.”

That stung Sheridan, because at the time he said it she was thinking she didn’t really know much about her own parents, where they came from, and therefore where she came from. Well, there was Grandma Missy, but she reminded Sheridan of some of the popular girls in her school. Missy was whatever she was at the time, but there wasn’t much more to her than that. Sheridan remembered her grandmother being the aristocratic wife of a real estate developer turned politician in Arizona whom they’d never seen. That’s when she first knew her, when her grandmother insisted she and Lucy call her “aunt.” Then Grandmother Missy moved to Wyoming, and now she was on the huge Longbrake Ranch. She’d done okay for herself, but Sheridan had no idea where she’d come from.

And she didn’t know much about her dad. Until that moment, when Arlen said it, she hadn’t given it much thought. Her dad didn’t talk much about growing up, but Sheridan always felt that it couldn’t have been too good. Once, when she asked him about his mom and dad, her grandparents whom she’d never met, he said, simply, “My parents drank.”

She had looked at him, waiting for more that never came.

“That’s one reason I wanted to be a game warden,” he said at the time, gesturing toward Wolf Mountain, as if he were explaining everything. There was also a hint about a younger brother, who would have been Sheridan’s only uncle. Something had happened to him. A car accident.

Unlike the Scarletts, who passed down everything, Sheridan’s family seemed to be starting anew, creating their own legacy and tradition. She didn’t know which was better. Or worse.

However, the longer Arlen talked, the happier Sheridan was that the family oral history in her household seemed to have started when her dad met her mom. What Arlen presented seemed to be too heavy a burden for a girl as shallow and frothy as Julie to carry on. It would be nice, though, to know more.

AS SHERIDAN AND Julie had gone upstairs for bed, Sheridan had noticed the pair of binoculars on a stand near a window in the hallway and had asked about them.

In response, Julie parted the curtain and pointed out across the ranch yard into a grove of trees, where Uncle Wyatt’s chicken coop could be seen in the distance.

“That way Uncle Arlen can check to see if Wyatt is around,” Julie said, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

“My grandma used to tell me stories,” Julie said to Sheridan when both girls were in Julie’s room for the night. “She’d tell me about my great-grandfather Homer, and my grandfather, her husband. And about my dad and my uncles. She had this really pretty voice that would put me to sleep. I really miss her, and that voice.”

Sheridan didn’t know quite how to respond. The Julie she knew from the bus and school-impetuous, fun loving, charismatic-was not the Julie she was with now. This Julie was cold, earnest, arrogant, superior-but at the same time very sad. She didn’t think she liked this Julie much, although she did feel sorry for her. This Julie just wanted to tell Sheridan things, not have a conversation. Although Julie’s monologues had, at first, been interesting, Sheridan had reached a point where she wished her friend would not make it so completely about her.

“You probably don’t know what it’s like to be a part of a famous family,” Julie said. “I mean, if it weren’t for the Scarletts, there would be no Saddlestring, and no nothing out there. Like, without us, you wouldn’t even be here. No offense, of course.”

“Of course not,” Sheridan said, sarcastically.

“You don’t have to be like that,” Julie said, sounding insulted. “I’m just telling you what is, you know? That’s what my grandma used to do. She made sure I knew I was special, and that my dad and uncles are special too. We have the Scarlett Legacy and nobody can take it from us. I’m the sole heir, that’s what she told me from the time I was little, how special that is.”

Sheridan simply nodded. This was going to be a long night.

“I miss her,” Julie said.