Jamie Mays

Jamie Mays is a woman with two children who recently left her husband. She used to live in a trailer park in Oakland with her husband and her two daughters. After she discovered that her husband was having an affair with her best friend, Jamie left Oakland with her young daughters. At the beginning of the novel, she and her daughters a Greyhound bus heading east. She plans to move in with her sister-in-law in Pennsylvania, but on the bus ride, she happens to befriend a man named Bill Houston. She and Bill spend time together in Pittsburgh, and when Bill leaves for Chicago, Jamie soon boards a bus with her daughters to follow him there. In Chicago, she is drugged and raped by a stranger, after which she is reunited with Bill.

Jamie, her daughters, and Bill then go to Phoenix, Arizona, where Bill’s mother...