Grace Jefferson is an educated and accomplished modern woman, a child of the Civil Rights dream, and she knows it. But after a series of rattling personal transitions, she finds herself in a new house in a new city and in a new career for which she feels dangerously unsuited: a stay-at-home mom. Caught between the only two models of mothering she has ever known--a sharecropping grandmother who abandoned her children to save herself and a mother who sacrificed all to save her kids--Grace struggles to embrace her new role, hoping to find a middle ground. But as the days pass and the pressures mount, Grace catches herself in small acts of abandonment--speeding up on neighborhood walks, closing doors with the children on one side and her on the other--that she fears may foretell a future she is powerless to prevent. Or perhaps one she secretly seeks.--From publisher description.