Sunny Rhodes

Sunny is the female protagonist of the story. She loses her mother at three years old due to polio, and she spends the rest of her life trying to learn more about the woman. As a child, she teaches herself French so that she can read the notes her mother left in her cookbooks. She wants to identify, and for others to identify her, as her mother’s daughter, and she follows in her mother’s footsteps by learning how to cook.

She falls in love with a man named Jesus who she and Stryker grew up with. The two are informally engaged, and Stryker performs a mock ceremony for them. After Jesus has to leave because of the incident with the elephant, she continues to sneak off to see him. One day, however, he tells her that he has found someone else, and she falls off...