Salamanca Tree Hiddle, or "Sal," is the protagonist in Sharon Creech’s Walk Two Moons. She is a young girl who has experienced loss at a young age. She is very sad that her mother left.

Sal and her grandparents take a road trip to retrace the mother’s route. However, Sal cannot get thoughts of her mother out of her head. She writes,

I wasn't thinking about Dad and Margaret. I was trying not to think about my mother, but often, when I talked about Phoebe, I saw my mother's face behind the things I was saying.

She feels abandoned. This makes her worry that her father might abandon her too, as he begins to spend much of his time with Margaret. Her fears affect her relationship with him, as well as with others, including Margaret.

She is suspicious that “Dad wanted to be alone with the red-headed Margaret Cadaver.” She is jealous of Margaret. She eventually realizes that “It looked like I was merely jealous of Mrs. Cadaver.”

Although not founded in truth, her fears "that everyone was going to leave, one by one” are understandable. The loss of her mother was deeply unsettling and created a huge void in her life.

However, her fears were not realized. Her father and her grandparents are there for her, and she even comes to respect Margaret, particularly when Margaret explains things about her father. Margaret says, “He is holding on to me because I was with your mother and held her hand in her last moments.”

Although Sal has difficulty facing the finality of her mother’s death and her own fears, she does by the end of the book. She writes, “it was only then, when I saw the stone and her name…that I knew, by myself and for myself, that she was not coming back."