Angela became a close friend of the deputy marshal helping her there and he frequently stopped by to visit. I had to explain to Marie why we had a new last name. I said sometimes people change their names when their mommies got married or when they moved to new towns. She was only five and she believed me. She asked about Sal, but not as much as I thought she would. He had never spent much time with her but she knew he was her daddy. After a few months, I began telling her Sal was really her uncle and he had moved back east. One day I told her her real daddy had been a pilot in the air force and had been killed. I told her he had loved her a lot but she probably was too young to remember him. She remembered seeing all the big airplanes in Rapid City at the air force base there so this lie made sense to her. It was what I was telling people in Phoenix, too—that I was a widow whose husband had died. Marie seemed to me to believe it. She thought Sal was her uncle and her daddy was dead.
