Summary

A 17-year-old female narrator named Ada sets out to recount what led her to become an outlaw. She describes the blissful beginning of her marriage in the 1890s. In school, Ada has learned that she is expected to have children in baby Jesus's image as a way ward off death and disease and how to behave when lying with her husband. She and her husband try to bring about a pregnancy. Ada accompanies her mother on rounds as the town's midwife, learning all that she can. Unlike most girls her age, she has already cared for an infant while helping her mother with her youngest sister Bee.

An entire year passes and Ada is still without child. Ada's mother decides that it is time for her daughter to take matters into her own hands by sleeping with another man, explaining that this is...