Part 4
Somewhere in South Dakota with Gram mending, Sal's story reaches its collapse: Phoebe's mother disappears, leaving cryptic notes and a full freezer.
Chanhassen's FireplaceRolling west, Sal describes her father: steady, kind, honest, happier with farm work than office paper — Euclid never fit him. Two days before leaving, her mother said she felt rotten beside his goodness, insisted she was neither good nor brave, and asked to be called her real name, Chanhassen, not Sugar. Afterward Dad chipped plaster, uncovered a hidden brick fireplace, wrote Chanhassen into its fresh edge, then took the Euclid job — Margaret Cadaver's town — and rented out the farm.
Blackberry KissIn Phoebe's story, Mr. Birkway assigns the class mini journals, and the lunatic stops the girls on the sidewalk again; Mrs. Winterbottom hears their news looking frightened, yet calls no one. For her journal Sal writes the blackberry kiss: her mother, pregnant and happy, eating blackberries and kissing the maple tree — and Sal kissing the same trunk afterward, tasting blackberries in the bark. Ben pretends to read Sal's palm, and an attempted kiss lands on her ear.
Mother GoneThen the floor drops: Phoebe's mother is gone, leaving short, cryptic notes — the one to her husband saying only that she had to go away, could not explain, and would call in a few days. Phoebe tries to conceal everything, even as Mr. Birkway has the class draw their souls in fifteen seconds and Sal and Ben produce identical drawings: a maple leaf inside a circle.
The Full FreezerSleeping over, Sal watches the household wobble. Phoebe malingers to dodge school and insists her mother was kidnapped by the lunatic — but her father opens the freezer to rows of labeled meals cooked ahead, evidence of a planned departure, not a crime. Walking home, Sal tells her father that maybe her mother was forced to leave; he answers gently that people must be allowed their own choices, and the two sit on the porch at sundown, melancholy and quiet.
| Section | What you will practice |
|---|---|
| Vocabulary | Hidden things and proof: cryptic, conceal, malinger, evidence, melancholy… |
| Literary Elements | A story nested inside a story, symbols that carry a mother’s presence, and flashbacks that arrive as taste and touch |
| Cross-Curricular | Badlands geology — how ordinary rain carves soft rock into spires and keeps uncovering one of Earth’s great fossil beds |
| Ch. | What happens |
|---|---|
| Chapter 18 | The Good Man — Sal paints her father plainly: kind, honest, drawn to work he can touch. Before leaving, her mother said she felt rotten beside his goodness and asked to be called Chanhassen, her real name, not Sugar. After she left, Dad uncovered a hidden brick fireplace behind the plaster, wrote Chanhassen into the wet edge, rented out the farm, and moved them to Euclid. |
| Chapter 19 | Fish in the Air — Gram asks for more of the story. Sal remembers her father bent over photo albums and refuses to hear how he met Margaret Cadaver. Mr. Birkway assigns mini journals. On the sidewalk the wild-eyed young man stops Sal and Phoebe again; Mrs. Winterbottom hears about it, looks shaken — and calls no one. |
| Chapter 20 | The Blackberry Kiss — In her journal Sal writes about her pregnant mother eating blackberries and kissing the maple tree — and about tasting blackberries in the bark herself. Mr. Birkway reads a poem about a newborn foal by the poet Edward Estlin Cummings, capital letters scattered on purpose. Ben’s almost-kiss lands on Sal’s ear. Then Phoebe’s mother is gone, leaving only brief, cryptic notes. |
| Chapter 21 | Souls — Phoebe walls off her trouble and tells no one at school. Mr. Birkway has the class draw their souls in fifteen seconds. Nearly everyone draws a circle with a design inside — and Sal’s and Ben’s come out identical: a maple leaf inside a circle. |
| Chapter 22 | Evidence — Sal sleeps over while the Winterbottom house wobbles. Phoebe malingers to skip school and insists the lunatic kidnapped her mother, but her father finds the freezer stocked with labeled meals cooked ahead — proof of a plan, not a crime. Walking home, Sal’s father says people must be allowed their own choices, and father and daughter sit melancholy on the porch. |
ⓘ The vocabulary words in this list are selected to help you understand and complete this workbook. Some may not appear verbatim in the original novel.
- Phoebe finds her mother gone and cryptic notes left behind.
- Mr. Winterbottom discovers frozen meals stocked in the freezer.
- Sal and Ben draw the same maple-leaf soul in class.
- The wild-eyed young man stops Sal and Phoebe on the sidewalk.
- Sal describes Dad uncovering a hidden brick fireplace.
Picture a two-lane highway running straight across South Dakota, prairie grass to every horizon, and one old car moving through it with the windows cracked. Gram rides with her leg propped up on the seat, still tender where a water moccasin bit her in the Missouri River, and she is not about to let that slow the trip down. Somewhere ahead, the flat land breaks into a wall of carved rock that two languages named as a warning. Tell more of the story, Gram says. So Sal tells the part where the worst thing actually happens: in Ohio, a mother who bakes and mends and is never thanked walks out her own front door and does not come back, leaving nothing behind but a few short notes. And while Sal tells it, her own memories keep breaking in without permission — a father chipping plaster off a hidden fireplace, a pregnant mother kissing a maple tree with blackberry-stained lips. Part 4 is the sound of two stories starting to rhyme.
Travelers crossing southwestern South Dakota see it rise from the prairie like a ruined city: a long wall of banded rock striped rose, gray, and gold, carved into spires and gullies. The Lakota called it mako sica — words meaning land bad. French fur trappers, hauling their loads around it, agreed, naming it the bad lands to cross. Both names deliver the same warning: little water, summer heat past one hundred degrees Fahrenheit, and a clay that every rain turns to grease — a forbidding place on foot.
The wall is a stack of soft sediments — mud, silt, and volcanic ash that settled between seventy-five million and twenty-eight million years ago. The oldest layers formed as black mud on the floor of a shallow inland sea; later ones were spread by slow rivers on a warm floodplain. Then, about half a million years ago, new rivers began cutting downward, and the layers proved too soft to resist. Rain does the sculpting now: each storm cuts the gullies deeper, sharpens the spires, and strips the wall back by roughly one inch every year. Nearby mountains of hard granite lose about one inch every ten thousand years.
Erosion this fast makes the Badlands both graveyard and library. The layers conceal one of the richest fossil beds on Earth — three-toed horses, sheep-sized plant eaters called oreodonts, and cat-like hunters with saber teeth — and every storm excavates fresh evidence: bones no human eye has seen, drawing paleontologists — scientists who read ancient life from fossils — back every summer. Yet the same rain that opens the library is erasing it. At an inch a year, the wall will likely be gone in half a million years, making these spires, on a geologist's clock, a fleeting sight.
“In geologic terms, that pace is a sprint.”
This writing task is optional and is not part of your auto-graded score. The feedback below checks only the basics — length, spelling, and grammar — not whether your ideas are right or wrong. It is meant for classroom discussion and creative practice, so feel free to use your imagination!
Writing Task — Part 4 “The Invisible Work”
Mrs. Winterbottom’s family only truly notices her on the morning she is gone — the cooking, the tidying, the steadiness were all invisible until they stopped. Think of care in your own life that is so constant it has become easy to overlook: who does it, what exactly it looks like, and what a single day would be like without it. 6–10 sentences. End with one specific thing you could say or do this week to make that person feel seen.
No right or wrong — close the screen and tell someone nearby what happened in this part. Can’t find anyone? Tell yourself out loud. The moment you teach it, you truly understand it.
Part 4 Complete!
You finished Chapters 18–22 of Walk Two Moons.
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Independent study guide by Garden Heights. Not affiliated with or endorsed by Sharon Creech. Contains original analysis only; no text from the novel is reproduced. Reference text: This workbook follows Sharon Creech’s classic text (the standard Puffin edition sold worldwide). Revised 2023 UK editions change some wording and may not match the vocabulary studied here.