of the moment, she decides to spend the last months of her pregnancy at her aunt and uncle's without the father of the child. 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. However, Kate's maternal instinct fails her soon after she has given birth: 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. And for all the harm I'd caused the world, nothing convinced me my body was wrong and ought to be curbed. ... 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. One day, Kate decides to join Douglas in Raleigh and to leave her son in her aunt's care. 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. All the time, her plans to fetch the baby are somewhere at the back of her mind. Without ever seeing his son, Douglas, who used to be Eller's driver before Kate, commits suicide in Eller's bathroom, obviously because of the high debts he has run up. 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. It is now that she finally abandons her son. She starts working in a library, becomes involved with Jay Mabry, a war veteran, but again backs out when he wants to get married. 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. We never learn why exactly it is that she is never contacted. Critical ReceptionKate Vaiden'' was awarded