“What do you mean here we are?” Cecilia asked. “Where is here?”
“This is Green Valley,” Dad said. “The Montgomery Ranch is right outside of town. We’ll stay here for the night. When I made our reservations for the Dude Ranch experience, the man I spoke with recommended the hotel here on Main Street for our first night.”
He had to slow the truck down to a virtual crawl as we made our way down the street. That was being generous. It was actually more like a dirt road, and though I was tempted to point out this was the tiniest town I had ever seen, I could barely bring myself to consider it a town.
From what we were seeing as we inched along, what my father called Main Street seemed like an assortment of random shops, restaurants, bakeries, and businesses I couldn’t recognize. Many of them looked like they were throwbacks from many decades ago. They were all scattered up and down the sides of the street without any real rhyme or reason.
But it wasn’t the various businesses or even the narrow street that was keeping us making incredibly frustrating progress. It was the people casually crossing the road and walking along the sidewalks, weaving in and out of the businesses.
I would almost say it was bustling if there were enough people to bustle. Finally, we made it to the end of the road and pulled into a parking lot. Dad stopped and I looked around, feeling a bit confused.
“Where’s the hotel?” I asked.
“Right there,” he said, pointing through the window before climbing out.
I leaned down to look through the window where he pointed, but what I saw couldn’t possibly have been what he was indicating. There was a sign indicating there was a hotel, but it looked like a prop from a horror film. None of the buildings around it looked like a hotel and I didn’t notice any chain names anywhere.
“Where?” I asked.
“Right there,” he repeated, pointing at the building butted up against the parking lot. “We are parked right at it.”
Cecilia stepped up to stand beside me. “You can’t be serious.”
“My sentiments exactly,” I said.
Dad already had his bag out and was making his way across the lot. Lucien and Rubin had already parked and were unloading. I looked to them for some sort of reason. They had to see the same thing I was seeing. It wasn’t possible they were lost in as much of a bubble as my father was right now. As his brother, Lucien was bound to be right about to step forward and call an end to all this silliness.
And yet, that wasn’t how it played out. They walked across the lot toward Daddy with almost tangible excitement.
“What’s wrong with it?” my father asked.
“It looks like a saloon,” I said.
“Because it is,” he said. “Or it was. More than one hundred years old. It hasn’t been a real saloon in a while. It was converted into a hotel decades ago. But the restaurant is right in the bottom and is apparently fantastic. Great reviews. Come on. Let’s get inside where it isn’t so cold.”
I was so horrified by the hotel and the fact that my father actually expected me to stay in a place like this, I had barely even noticed the chill in the air. Now that he mentioned it, the air soaked through my clothes and made me shiver.
“I thought the whole point of bringing us to Montana was to show us where you came from and give us a glimpse of life before you went to California,” I said.
“That is what I want,” Dad said.
“Then why are we here?” I asked. “Why did we come to Green Valley, and why are we doing this Dude Ranch experience? Couldn’t we have just done, like, a historic drive-by tour of all the important sites of your life?”
“I wanted you to actually experience it,” he said as if that was enough to justify this whole thing. “I know it’s different and you’re still getting used to it right now. But just give it a little time and you’ll see. You’re going to love it. Let’s get to our rooms and freshen up a bit. Then we’ll meet up at the restaurant for dinner. I’m starving.”
Even if I was trying to have an open mind about the hotel, that all would have stopped when I got to the restaurant.
“This is the restaurant?” I asked as we walked through the heavy