It was like the way you wanted sunshine on Saturdays, or pancakes for breakfast. They just made you feel good.

She was so Southern that she cried tears that came straight from the Mississippi, and she always smelled faintly of cottonwood and peaches.

She never thought she was good at making friends. But maybe she was just trying to be friends with the wrong people.

Blank-slate friendships were thin and temperamental. She knew that. There was no history there to cement people together, for better or worse.

There was a mood of magic and frenzy to the room. Crystalline swirls of sugar and flour still lingered in the air like kite tails. And then there was the smell-the smell of hope, the kind of smell that brought people home.

Sometimes people who had been together for a long time got to imagining that things used to be better, even when they weren't.

It was like the way you wanted sunshine on Saturdays, or pancakes for breakfast. They just made you feel good.