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said before moving to the door to welcome in more Monday night knitting group members.
    Fifteen minutes after six, the wine was flowing with nary a needle in motion when one final woman pushed in through the door.
    “Sorry I’m late.”
    “Brownies will make it all better,” another woman said. “You do have brownies don’t you?”
    “Why do you think I’m late?” the latecomer replied with a laugh, but to Andi’s ears it sounded forced.
    She put the tray of brownies on the table, then looked up in surprise. “Oh. Andi. I didn’t expect you to be here.”
    Andi hadn’t seen her old friend in years. Now, as she took a good look at Catherine, she almost didn’t recognize her.
    Andi remembered her as being a cute blond, not a mousy brunette whose once fit frame now carried around an extra thirty pounds.
    “Catherine, how are you?”
    Andi wasn’t prepared for her onetime friend to look her straight in the eyes and say, “Apart from divorcing my rat bastard husband, I’m all right.”
    The women all around them still chatted as if everything was perfectly normal. Andi scrambled to find an appropriate response. But really, there wasn’t one.
    Catherine shrugged, a show of nonchalance that Andi didn’t buy.
    “Welcome home,” Catherine said before going and sitting down on a couch in the opposite corner.
    Andi hadn’t even known Catherine had been married. Then again, she hadn’t gone to any of their high school reunions or registered at any social networking sites.
    Dorothy tapped her wineglass several times with a knitting needle. “Everyone,” she said authoritatively, “please say hello to Andi, Carol’s daughter.” The woman’s eyes twinkled. “Even if you already know each other from her years growing up here, be sure to tell her something unique and memorable about yourself.”
    Andi looked up from her spot behind the register. She’d hoped to be able to sit there and hide out for a couple of hours while the knitting group did their thing. But when Dorothy scooted over on the couch and patted the seat beside her, Andi knew she was cornered and cornered good.
    “Andi and I have already met,” Helen said, “but just to be sure you don’t forget me, you should know that I have never so much as stuck a toe into the lake and never plan to.”
    Andi was so stunned by Helen’s admission that she completely forgot her manners. “Why not?”
    “I had an unfortunate incident with a swimming pool when I was a child,” Helen said with a shake of her head.
    “But swimming in the lake is incredible.”
    From the time Andi could walk, she’d loved to run off the end of her parents’ dock and cannonball into the water, whether eighty degrees at the height of summer or somewhere in the sixties in the late spring and early fall.
    Andi was surprised by a fierce—and sudden—urge to run out of the store, strip off her clothes, and go running off a dock, any dock, just so she could experience that glorious moment when she hit the water.
    Being surrounded with floor-to-ceiling yarn all day had clearly started to make her go a little nuts.
    “I’m sure it is,” Helen said regretfully before turning the table over to the middle-aged woman sitting next to her. “Your turn, Angie.”
    “I have four little monsters at home, and were it not for the fact that I knew I was going to be able to escape to this group after a weekend when none of them would stop screaming, I might very well have had an unfortunate incident of my own in the lake. On purpose.”
    Everyone laughed, but Andi struggled with knowing what the right response was. It had been years since she’d known the comfort of being around other women. At work, she was primarily surrounded by men, and given her rule about no emotional entanglements in the office, Andi spent the bulk of her time with people who were pretty much just professional acquaintances.
    Catherine was next. “Andi and I go way back. She doesn’t need to hear me bore her