Step-and-a-Half leaves Roy and Delphine to resume wandering

Step-and-a-Half leaves Roy and Delphine to resume wandering because walking is the way she has learned to live with the memories of the Wounded Knee massacre. Her departure is not a clean break: she knows she will leave Roy to care for the baby, yet later returns, gives him money for the child, and sometimes tries to tend Delphine. The pattern joins flight to attachment, making movement both her refuge from the past and the condition under which her care continues.

The Need to Keep Moving

Step-and-a-Half’s reasons for leaving are bound to memories that other people around her cannot fully understand. She has seen the trust of an infant nursing from its murdered mother and remembers a toddler who raised his arms to his face as if the gesture could make him invisible. She has also heard of a baby who survived three days in a blizzard and was found frozen in its mother’s blood, wearing a small cap decorated with an American flag. Such memories, including what she cannot remember clearly, make stillness difficult to bear.

Walking offers a way to outdistance those recollections. The open spaces she moves through are empty of human cruelty; weather and landscape are easier for her to endure than the remembered violence of people. Wind and clouds can also drown out the languages that link her to the massacre and to her father. Her choice to resume wandering is therefore not presented as a rejection of Roy or the child alone: it belongs to a survival pattern formed by trauma.

Leaving Roy with the Baby

Roy understands that he cannot expect Step-and-a-Half to remain in one place. He fears that she is already thinking of walking, and knows that she will eventually leave him with the baby. The separation follows from a difference in how they can live: Roy settles into caring for the child, while Step-and-a-Half has long relied on movement to keep unbearable memories at a distance.

Her departure does not mean that she feels no responsibility for the girl. Step-and-a-Half does not yet know that she will return again and again, give Roy money to secure the child’s future, and attempt, in small and awkward ways, to help raise her. These later acts complicate the apparent finality of leaving. She cannot make herself into a continuously present parent, but neither does she disappear from the child’s life altogether.

A Bond That Does Not Become Conventional

Step-and-a-Half’s connection to Delphine is shaped by limited contact, practical care, and the absence of a biological tie. She knows that she is leaving the baby in Roy’s care, and Delphine will grow up without a settled maternal relationship with her. Yet she contributes money for the girl’s security and sometimes offers care when she comes back. Her affection is expressed through intermittent actions rather than a promise to stay.

Much later, Step-and-a-Half remembers Delphine as a little girl playing in the dirt and following after her. When the child calls her “Mama?” Step-and-a-Half stops and kneels to face her. She tells Delphine that her mother is dead; the child’s expression briefly closes, then steadies. Delphine strikes Step-and-a-Half on the forehead with her fist, and Step-and-a-Half responds, “Good. The tough ones live.” The exchange makes their bond vivid without suggesting that Step-and-a-Half can replace the mother the child has lost. Instead, it recognizes the girl’s capacity to survive.

Wandering and Retrospective Memory

The narrative returns to this departure through Step-and-a-Half’s later memories. In old age, she can seldom summon the strength for more than short walks near her small shop on an Argus side street, though longer walks still temporarily soothe her torment and delay reflection. As she rests under a quilt sewn from the fabrics she collected, earlier scenes come back to her with startling clarity. The remembered departure is thus framed not only as an action in the past but as part of a life that she continues to revisit.

Her recollections place Roy’s care for the baby alongside other moments in the family’s history: her first impression of Fidelis carrying a suitcase she thought empty, her later knowledge that it held his knives, and her knowledge that it would eventually return to Germany. She also remembers Eva’s boys, Eva’s death, and the boy rescued from a collapsed mound. These returns show how the decision to leave belongs to a wider life of arrivals, losses, and departures. The act is decisive, but its consequence is not disappearance: Step-and-a-Half keeps moving, while memory and her repeated returns preserve her connection to the people she leaves behind.