Sal’s maternal grandparents are upstanding and, as Momma once told Sal, “busy being “respectable.” They don’t appear in person in the novel, only in others’ conversation. Sal explains that the only wild thing her grandmother ever did was to give Momma her Native American name, Chanhassen. When Ben accuses Sal of flinching whenever she’s touched, Sal fears that she’s becoming like her Pickford grandparents.