Mary-Sue spent the next few years keeping Kate all to herself, teaching her how to eat, dress, potty, spell, and rub her little button nose against hers in the Eskimo fashion. Under Mary-Sue’s tutelage, Kate developed quickly into an American child, with no memory of the orphanage in the coastal village of Quy Nhon where she’d spent her first years. Or of the crash. The only time Mary-Sue received a prickly visitation from Kate’s past was when, at age five, she started crying uncontrollably as soon as she heard Bing Crosby singing “White Christmas.” Later, reading a Friends of the Children of Viet Nam newsletter, Mary-Sue learned that the song had been used by the US Armed Forces in Vietnam as a signal. Whenever it had come on the radio, Crosby’s warbling was accompanied by the live orchestral boom of choppers and the satanic timpani of guns and bombs.

When Kate turned seven, Mary-Sue found work as an executive assistant at a human resources company in Southern California, and they moved. She wanted her Katie to assimilate into the real America, and San Francisco, that artificial oasis of tolerance, permissiveness and multiculturalism, was too much of a bubble for that. Not that she’d ever consider moving them back to the comatose heartland of her youth.

Mary-Sue found the homey old Craftsman houses of Alta Vista inviting—and different enough from Des Moines that she didn’t experience debilitating pangs of déjà vu. Compared to the Bay Area, a modest sum bought you a decent house with a yard in this part of the state, so she took out some of Daddy’s endowment and set down new roots. She became a suburbanite homeowner, like the rest of the people on Santa Claus Lane. The majority of her neighbors were Anglo working families who’d been there at least two generations, very square in their way but also very comforting. There was also a smattering of black folks who seemed like remnants from a different era—stragglers from the Great Migration too downtrodden to pick up their things and run north after their kin. Mary-Sue wished they would say hi but they mostly kept to themselves.

Putting down roots felt good, and right. When the holidays came round, Mary-Sue and Kate signed off on Christmas cards as “The Girls of Santa Claus Lane.”

The backyard became their haven. Together, mother and daughter harvested oranges off their own tree and ran about, year-round, on bare feet. A family of pet hamsters had their last rites read to them in rapid succession under their shady oak. Weekends, Mary-Sue took Kate for pancakes at the Good Ol’ Times cafe; for culture, they went to nearby Pasadena and took videos out of the public library. And if that wasn’t good enough, there were parks and all kinds of fun that cost no money at all.