When I first met Nanci Kincaid, after the publication of her endearing novel "Verbena," (Algonquin, 2002), about a rejected wife and a man whose name, Lucky, is the height of irony, we got along like collard greens and fatback. My father was a Mississippian; she is from there, too.

My father's accent reattached itself to my tongue as we talked and we shared our awe and amusement at the resilience, unfailing politeness, cheerfulness and mendacity of "Southern ladies," who to this day live by arcane rules, impossible to master if you didn't grow up there. If you don't understand all the possible meanings that can be attached to the oft-repeated, "Bless her (or your) heart," murmured in a treacly tone, for example, you'll miss some of the nuance in a Nanci Kincaid novel.

But don't let that stop you from reading her latest, "Eat, Drink and Be From Mississippi" (hardback, Little, Brown, $23.99). It's a treat, about a pair of Mississippians who wipe the dust of Hinds County from their feet as soon as they exit high school, make it good in California, and then find that some of those old Southern values — hospitality and good manners being the least of them — have their worth, even in San Jose, Calif.

Kincaid, married to former UH football coach Dick Tomey (she dedicated this book to him), now lives much of the year in San Jose, where he is working, but they maintain a home in Honolulu, too.

"Eat, Drink and Be from Mississippi" is a feel-good story wrapped up in a lot of pain. Truley Noonan and his sister, Courtney, both do well financially — he a dot.commer, she the wife of a wealthy man. But both lose the people they love and gain a sort of patched-together family, all but adopting a black teenager who worms his way into their lives without an invitation and stays to see both of them come back to life — changed, and yet still the two plain-speaking, hardworking, ethical and, yes, automatically polite Southerners "abroad."

Sister Courtney draws brother Truely back to his roots. "I'll cook you a good Mississippi-style supper," she tells him. "I've already bought the Velveeta." Though they have drawn apart, they comfort each other as best they can after they're cut off from their spouses.

But they're mostly just treading water until young Arnold, the ignored son of a druggie mom, enters their lives like a rogue wave.

"Sometimes, you just got to go on and do things, man. Ready or not," Arnold tells Truely when he drops out of school, finds a job and moves to San Jose to live on his own and get away from the bad influences in his hometown.

They meet through Truely's girlfriend, whose brother had befriended Arnold in high school, though possibly not for the right reasons.

One day, without warning, Arnold shows up at Truely's bachelor apartment, having lost his place to live, and settles in a corner of the wall-less loft before Truly and Courtney, who is visiting from her home elsewhere in California, can think of how to react.

They introduce him to Thai food (he hates it). He reintroduces them to caring.

Just as they're finding some kind of balance as a pseudo-family, predictably, tragedy strikes.

Kincaid is a master of character, dialogue and conveying accents and emotion without contrivance.

"Funny how you download a particular vocabulary in childhood — and it remained the preferred dialect of your interior life. To Truely 'father' was another word for God, not somebody's daddy. He had never had much interest in being a father. But he always dreamed of being somebody's daddy," she writes. Arnold loans Truely a chance to be a sort of daddy, someone who's there for you no matter what, who is wise, resourceful and, above all, interested enough in you to be hard on you when you need it, gentle when you need that.

Not to sound like some hackneyed line from a theater review — "they laughed, they cried, they left humming the overture" — but this book ends on a thoroughly satisfying, justice-done-for-all note. Truely doesn't get the girl, though Courtney, predictably, does fine by herself. But they all get each other.

"Time and money well spent," says Truely after Arnold survives a harrowing legal wrangle.

The same can be said of "Eat, Drink and Be From Mississippi."