Greta Shaw

… is Earth Science, there is Geography, there is a notepad, a pencil, a lunch his mother’s cook, Mrs. Greta Shaw, has made for him in the chrome-and-Formica kitchen where a fan whirrs eternally, sucking up alien odors. In his lunch sack he has a peanut butter …

Jake’s school-day account names Greta as the cook who packed his lunch.

Usually there was nobody around when he came home from school except for Greta Shaw—the housekeeper—and so he ended up showing his A papers to her. After that, they migrated to a dark corner of his room.

Jake remembers showing his school papers to housekeeper Greta.

SOUNDS HAWAIIAN DOESN’T IT! PLEASE CONTRIBUTE TO MY WELFARE! Greta Shaw had been with Jake the first time he encountered the saw-player, and Jake remembered how she had hurried past the guy.

Jake remembers Greta hurrying past the street musician.

… and Flagg; he saw Eldred Jonas’s gunbunnies, Depape and Reynolds; he saw his mother and father and Greta Shaw, their housekeeper, who looked a little like Edith Bunker on TV and who always remembered to cut the crusts off his sandwiches. Greta Shaw who …

Jake recalls Greta and her habit of cutting the crusts off his sandwiches.

… out of Gilead, the former drug addict out of Brooklyn, the lonely child who had once been known to Mrs. Greta Shaw as ’Bama. Coming south from behind them, rolling through thickening banners of smoke on the SCT (diverting from a straight course only once, to …

The narrator identifies Jake by the nickname Greta used for him.