Over at Luckettville High, there are certain cliques one has to be aware of if one is to enjoy a successful career as a student. You have your jocks, your honor roll kids, and your chess club geeks. There are the cheerleaders, the drill team members, and the beauty queens. But mostly there are kids who have known each other since birth, teenagers whose lifelong friendships can intimidate newcomers like Taylor Marshall, whose father was transferred to Luckettville for a job at the auto plant when Taylor was a junior in high school.

“Look, Taylor,” said her father when she came home crying after her first week at school, complaining about how insular the other kids were. “There will always be someone cuter than you and someone uglier than you. Someone richer and someone poorer. Smarter and dumber. That’s the way the world works.”

“You’ll just have to try extra hard to get involved,” said her mother, Melanie, who, like Taylor’s father, is a practical sort. “Soon you’ll feel like you belong and no one will even remember that you’re really an outsider and considered suspect simply because you don’t hail from around here.”

Thinking back to her own high school years, Melanie had to admit there were days she didn’t feel very popular either. Not to put too fine a point on it, but Melanie didn’t date much. The fact that she made it to senior prom still strikes her as nothing short of a miracle some three decades later. Lucky for her, Reggie Reynolds was shy around girls, so he made just the right escort for a wallflower such as herself.

Melanie suspects to this day that her mother and Mrs. Reynolds conspired to make it happen, but she doesn’t care. Melanie got a new dress and Reggie turned out to be a decent dancer. Melanie has, more than once, been described as someone who “dances likes nobody’s watching”; that’s how uncoordinated she is. But they had fun, and Melanie has a photograph pasted in a scrapbook to prove it. She didn’t even mind when Reggie pulled up in his father’s dinged-up truck because his mother’s station wagon had a flat tire. Reggie had been a few dollars short of buying his own car, despite working extra shifts at the record store.

“Sorry about the wheels,” he had said as he handed Melanie a wrist corsage, nodding toward the truck. He’d sprung for the orchid, which had impressed Melanie’s mother.

Reggie Reynolds made Melanie feel like the luckiest girl in the world, and she wanted her daughter to have a night like that. So as that first school year in Luckettville drew to a close, and Taylor had found a group of friends and even landed a leading role in the annual theatrical production of Our Town (“And just think,” said Melanie to Mr. Marshall when commenting on their children’s ever-widening social circles, “we’re not even from around here!”), she asked her mother if she could invite some classmates over for midnight breakfast after the prom. Apparently Taylor was going with the best-looking guy at school—everybody said so—and she wanted to impress him. Melanie was touched, she must admit, that her daughter thought her mother’s food might be a way to the young man’s heart.

Melanie had long been interested in cooking, but it was only after they moved to Luckettville and she started taking classes from Honey Holcomb that Melanie started to shine. She’d noticed an ad in the Luckettville Gazette and decided to give it a shot, hoping that she might finally learn how to season a cast-iron skillet properly, and maybe even make a friend or two. Melanie hated being so needy at her age, so desperate for companionship. Their relocation had been good for her husband’s career but challenging for Melanie and Taylor, and she was trying not to complain. With time, though, Melanie discovered, just as Taylor had, that the people in Luckettville were lovely and welcoming and friendly, once they realized you meant them no harm simply because you came from the Midwest.

Melanie had been using her family as culinary guinea pigs for several months when it was time for the prom breakfast. Taylor had barely gotten the request out of her mouth before Melanie began drawing up the perfect menu: ham and cheese omelets, red velvet pancakes with maple cream cheese, puffed French toast, scrambled egg cups, fried country ham and apple walnut cheese biscuits, and cherry cobbler cupcakes.

She got out ten place settings of Strasbourg from the box with the velvet lining and polished every piece. She ordered flowers from Irma down at the Bouquet Boutique and put the leaf in the dining room table, making a mental note to get some unscented candles. In the nick of time, she got the idea to have Mr. Marshall and Taylor’s brother serve as waiters. They balked at first, especially when Melanie told them they would have to wear suits and they weren’t allowed to embarrass Taylor, which was one of their favorite pastimes. In the end, though, the boys rallied around their two favorite girls, serving from the left and clearing from the right, until each nervous teenager had his or her fill.

“Feeding the hungry is what I’m meant to do,” Melanie told Mr. Marshall as they cleaned the kitchen after the kids were gone, their own two asleep upstairs. Mr. Marshall nodded, hoping this didn’t mean they’d have to entertain twenty teenagers every Friday night until it was time for college.

The next day Melanie went down to All Souls Chapel and volunteered to cook for the upcoming Wednesday night suppers during the summer. Honey Holcomb had gotten too busy with her cooking classes, and Melanie thought she was just the person to step in. She’d been taught by the best, after all. At least that’s what Honey says.