Sal and Terry’s final parting

Sal and Terry’s final parting brings their shared life in California to a restrained close. In the vineyard, Terry kisses Sal without visible emotion and walks away; after they turn to look at each other once more, Sal leaves for New York, carrying the knowledge that their farewell is final in practice even as he offers the hope of meeting again.

The Farewell in the Vineyard

Terry brings Sal breakfast on the morning he is ready to leave. His canvas bag is packed, and he plans to collect money waiting for him in Sabinal before setting out for New York. Terry has spent the night thinking about his departure and is resigned to it. She kisses him without display of emotion, then walks down the vineyard row. They turn back after a dozen paces and look at one another for the last time. The scene makes separation a physical action—kiss, withdrawal, return glance—rather than a quarrel or a negotiated decision.

Sal calls after her, saying that he will see her in New York. Terry is supposed to travel there with her brother in a month, but both understand she will not make the trip. The promise therefore offers a momentary verbal bridge across a departure whose practical meaning they already recognize. From a hundred feet away, Sal looks back again: Terry is walking to the shack with his breakfast plate in one hand. He bows his head and resumes the road.

From the Vineyard to the Road

After leaving Terry, Sal walks toward Sabinal, eating black walnuts from a tree and balancing along the Southern Pacific tracks. He passes a water tower and a factory, registering the landscape as the end of something. At the railroad telegraph office, he expects to collect the money order from New York, but the office is closed. He waits on the steps until the ticket master returns and invites him inside; the money has arrived, sent by his aunt. The practical necessity of reaching Sabinal thus becomes the hinge between the intimate leave-taking and the journey east.

Sal leaves Sabinal hoping to catch a freight train, but none comes. Instead, he hitchhikes toward Los Angeles with a fiddler from a California cowboy band, who drives a new car at eighty miles an hour. They cover roughly 250 miles in four hours. The speed and uproar of the ride sharply contrast with the stillness of the vineyard farewell: once separated from Terry, Sal is again moving through a succession of vehicles, roads, and chance encounters.

The Return East

In Hollywood, Sal retrieves his rejected original from Columbia Pictures and buys a bus ticket to Pittsburgh because he lacks enough money to travel all the way to New York. With four hours before departure and only a dollar remaining, he makes ten sandwiches from bread and salami for the cross-country trip. His last night in Hollywood becomes an image of frustrated ambition and departure: he eats and prepares for the road in the back of a parking lot while the lights of a premiere flare over the city.

The bus carries him east across Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas. Sal reads the American landscape more than the book he has with him, and the journey’s repeated motion of going home gives the return a rhythm larger than this single separation. In St. Louis he walks beside the Mississippi River; later, after reaching Pittsburgh, he still has 365 miles to hitchhike to New York and only a dime in his pocket. The parting with Terry does not resolve Sal’s restlessness or secure a new home. It places him once more in transit, with the relationship left behind and the road carrying him toward the East.