August: Osage County: Act 3, Scene 4 Summary & Analysis

It is morning, and the living room is bathed in light. Barbara and Sheriff Gilbeau are standing together in the living room. She offers him some coffee, but he declines. She tells him that he looks good, and he thanks her for the compliment. She asks if he’s going to tell her that she looks good, too, and he hurriedly does so. Barbara offers Gilbeau coffee again, and again he declines.

Barbara tells Gilbeau she feels a hot flash coming on, and then asks Gilbeau some more about his life—he is divorced, and she tells him that she’ll soon be joining his club. Gilbeau reveals he has three daughters, and that he often thinks about “the Weston sisters” when he looks at them. Gilbeau then asks if Barbara’s husband is still here—Barbara says that he went back home, but she can’t remember whether he left a few days ago or as many as two weeks ago. There is a silence between them, and Gilbeau asks Barbara if she’s okay. She tells him she’s “just got the Plains.”

Gilbeau asks Barbara if she would like to get lunch someday and catch up. She says that she would. He then reveals the real reason he came—he got a call from the woman who runs a local motel, the Country Squire. When the woman saw Beverly Weston’s picture in the paper along with his obituary, she recognized him as someone who had patronized her motel not too long ago. She called the police and told them that he’d stayed at her inn for two nights—the first two nights of his absence. Gilbeau tells Barbara that he is going to check the phone records to see if any calls went out or came in while Beverly was at the motel. Barbara tells Gilbeau that his effort would be useless—no one knew where her father was staying.

Gilbeau gets ready to leave and asks Barbara if he can call her sometime. In response, Barbara asks Gilbeau to come closer to her. He does, and she touches his face, as if in a trance. She kisses him, and then moves away. Barbara starts to say something but keeps trailing off. When Gilbeau asks her what the matter is, she says that she’s forgotten what she looks like.