Walk Two Moons

Sal and her grandparents cross into Illinois, where Gram spots Lake Michigan and asks to go wading in it: “‘Huzza, huzza!’ Gram said, wriggling her heels into the sand. ‘Huzza, huzza!’” (36). That night, Sal finds herself thinking about the weeks after her mother left, recalling that she initially didn’t know how to feel; the first time she saw a newborn calf and realized she was happy, she “was surprised that [she] knew this all by [her]self, without [her] mother there” (37). After getting lost in Chicago the following morning, Gramps announces his plans to hurry through Wisconsin and Minnesota before visiting the Badlands and Black Hills in South Dakota. Sal is apprehensive, partly because her mother visited those places on her bus trip.

As Gram and Gramps bicker over Gloria, Sal resumes her story. One weekend while Sal is at Phoebe’s house, a young man rings the doorbell. Phoebe and Sal are home alone, and Phoebe is wary of strangers—an attitude she learned from her mother, who fears “one of them will burst into the house with a gun and turn out to be an escaped lunatic” (41). Nevertheless, the girls answer the door, and the man nervously asks to speak with Mrs. Winterbottom. Phoebe says her mother can’t come to the door, and the man declines to leave a message. After he leaves, the girls run to the home of their classmate Mary Lou Finney: “Phoebe was certain that the young man was going to ambush us. Honestly. Like I said, she has a vivid imagination” (44).

Phoebe and Sal arrive at the Finneys’ to find the house in an uproar: Mary Lou’s three brothers are racing from room to room, Mr. Finney is lying fully clothed in the bath tub, and Mrs. Finney is napping on top of the garage. Sal remembers how enthusiastically the Finney parents had participated in a school games day. Phoebe expressed disapproval at the time, but Sal suspects she might have been secretly jealous. Sal and Phoebe go to Mary Lou’s room, where they’re joined by her cousin Ben. He compliments Sal on her long hair and draws a picture of a lizard sitting on a chair made of hair, which he captions “Salamander sitting on her hair” (48). As Sal hands the drawing back to him, his lips brush against her collarbone, and she wonders if he’d meant to kiss her.

Back at Phoebe’s house, the girls tell Mrs. Winterbottom about the “lunatic.” Mrs. Winterbottom questions them about his appearance before asking them not to say anything to her husband. The girls then find a message on the porch reading, “Don’t judge a man until you’ve walked two moons in his moccasins” (49). When Mr. Winterbottom returns home, he dismisses the letter as unimportant, but his wife seems bothered by it. 

Gram expresses sympathy for Mrs. Winterbottom, saying, “Being a mother is like trying to hold a wolf by the ears” (51). Gramps stops in Madison, Wisconsin; in lieu of paying to park, he writes a note claiming to be veteran with shrapnel in his leg. Sal insists on leaving soon after lunch without sending a postcard home, in part because she’s troubled by memories of the cards her mother sent on her own trip. Later in the day, Gramps stops at a fort where Gram and Sal watch a group of Native Americans dance. As Sal thinks about how her mother (who was part Seneca) preferred the term “Indian,” she drifts off to sleep. When she wakes up, she can’t find Gram or Gramps and panics, imagining she’s been left behind. As she looks more closely at the dancers, however, she realizes that Gram is dancing at the center of the circle.