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business tacked on to the back end.
    Scrambling to cover her gaffe, she said, “It’s been such a busy day in the store that I almost forgot it was Monday night.” The women just stared at her as she babbled unconvincingly. “Can I get you two anything?”
    The slightly younger woman with shiny gray hair laughed. “Not to worry, honey, we always come prepared.”
    The women produced four bottles of wine along with a big plastic container full of big chocolate chip cookies. Andi’s stomach growled as she tried to get her exhausted, overwhelmed brain to remember where the glasses were.
    Fortunately the knitting group regulars were way ahead of her as they opened the small doors of the coffee table and began to pull out mismatched tumblers for the wine.
    More long-buried memories came at Andi, joining all the others that had been scrambling into her brain all day. It had been her job, after everyone had gone, to wash out the glasses in the kitchen sink and dry them and put them back under the coffee table. Her grandmother always told her how important her role was, that wine made people comfortable, that it let them talk about the secrets they shouldn’t be holding inside.
    The Monday night knitting group had been going on as long as her grandmother had owned the store. Evelyn always said the group was as important to her as family—and that they were responsible for keeping her sane more than once over the years. As a little girl, Andi had loved sitting on the floor, listening to the women talk, laugh, and cry. But by ten she had grown out of it. Not just the knitting group, but anything to do with yarn or the store.
    Andi still remembered her last ever Monday night at Lake Yarns. She had been sitting next to Mrs. Gibson and only half listening to her complain about her swollen ankles to the woman next to her. Andi swore Mrs. Gibson was always pregnant. One of her kids was in Andi’s fifth-grade class, and John had five younger siblings already.
    Andi had been working on a scarf for her father in a zigzag pattern, but she kept screwing it up. Bad enough that she needed help unraveling it and then getting it back onto the needles so she could fix her mistakes. Her mother and grandmother were both busy helping other people, and she had no choice but to turn to Mrs. Gibson.
    “ Of course, I’ll help you with this, honey, ” the woman had said. “ You know, it’s no surprise you’re having trouble with this scarf. John told me how smart you are. You’re going to go out there and do big, important things like your daddy. You really don’t belong here with us knitters, do you? ”
    Andi was pulled back to the present as she heard a throat being cleared and looked up to see that the red-haired woman was holding out a glass of wine, saying, “I didn’t know Evelyn and Carol had hired anyone new.”
    Andi gratefully took the glass and was about to respond with her name when the woman said, “Wait a minute. I need to put my glasses on.” Later, after a few moments of peering, she said, “Andi? Don’t you recognize me? It’s Dorothy. Dorothy Johnson.”
    Andi suddenly realized why the woman looked so familiar. It was her hair that had thrown Andi off, red instead of dark brown, and the fact that she seemed to have shrunk several inches in the past decade.
    Dorothy introduced her to Helen who had moved to Emerald Lake five years earlier.
    “I would have eventually guessed who you were,” Helen said. “You really are the perfect combination of Evelyn and Carol.”
    “I look more like my dad,” Andi said automatically.
    “I can see Richard in you certainly, but if you ask me, you take after the women in your family more. I’m so sorry about his passing, honey. We all were.”
    It was hard to hear her father’s name on a stranger’s lips, harder still to be reminded that he was gone.
    Andi briskly smiled. “Thanks. Please don’t hesitate to let me know if there’s anything else I can help you with,” she