[1] The novel focuses on the life of a white woman from the American South who, after a teenage pregnancy, abandons her son shortly after giving birth to him and who does not get in touch with him for four decades.

In the final part of the book, which is set in 1984, she meets one of the last surviving members of her family, her cousin Swift, in a local nursing home.

Kate is born in 1927 and grows up as an only child in Greensboro, North Carolina with her young parents Dan and Frances Vaiden.

Her happy childhood is suddenly interrupted when, in 1938, for reasons she can never quite fathom, her father shoots her mother and then himself, leaving her to be raised by her aunt and uncle, Caroline and Holt Porter.

One summer afternoon down by the Roanoke River, Gaston Stegall, the neighbours' boy, shows her his erection, and she gives him a handjob, without really knowing what she is doing.

I'd suspected as much and, as I've said, heard rumors at school; so I let Noony tell me all she knew.At 13, Kate finally has sexual intercourse with Gaston.

At 16, Kate escapes her surroundings and everything that might remind her of Gaston by stealing off to Norfolk, Virginia, where her cousin, Walter Porter, is living with his orphaned "friend," Douglas Lee, from back home.

In 1944, everyone has to get used to a young woman expecting an illegitimate child, but then Lee Vaiden is born and, as he is a strong, healthy boy, everything seems to be turning out fine.

They were glad to take over, in perfect silence.Also, it occurs to Kate that a life without a man is not the right thing for her: With Gaston and Douglas I'd used my body more ways than any white girl my age I'd read about or known.

I couldn't just maim that much of myself by bolting doors on the wide green world and camping-down forever in a house with no man near me under sixty years old.

In Raleigh, unable to find Douglas, she makes the acquaintance of a young blind man called Whitfield Eller, who works as a piano tuner.

Realizing that sooner or later she will have to take a job, Kate teams up with Eller, driving the blind man's car to get him safely and on time to his customers.

When Eller proposes to Kate, the latter, who has turned out to be a quitter, once again leaves everything behind her and moves on—this time to Greensboro, where she joins her former teacher, Miss Limer.

She spends the next decades as a single woman working in a lawyer's office, never more than a two-hour drive away from her old home and, accordingly, easy to track down.