Inside she found a clerk and asked for Hank, and she waited for him by the coin machine, trading in all her pennies for a flimsy receipt that explained she had earned nine dollars.

Just after Mrs. Dawson jangled open the double padlock, just after she turned the sign in the window from Closed. Please come again to Welcome, Lupita entered the tiny cramped store where the eggs were fresh but the lettuce just shy of wilting.

NORAH:  You don’t have sex when I’m menstruating. Right, maybe that’s
fucking cultural. You remind me of Dele.                

SIMON:  ‘Dele’. Very familiar. If Ayodele’s your standard, maybe you should
enlighten me. You sound like you know him very well, like you’ve been doing
a personal survey on Nigerian men and their sexual hab--

I grew up surrounded by fields and the valley landscape can be almost oppressive in its unending flatness, but there are times - whether because of the weather, the clouds, the light - where I'm overwhelmed by its immense beauty, by its ability to catch me off guard even though I've lived there my entire life.

With Tatiana’s mother wailing out the bay windows of their tiny living room, and her mother’s boyfriend driving his clankety-clank Ford around mad, and the police officers having done their so-called part, and the church people littering the streets with Xerox copies of her school picture, and even the ice cream truck driver getting questioned, it was up to us now.  Somebody had to use common sense.