Kate Jacobs by The Friday Night Knitting Club - [The Friday Night Knitting Club 01] Read Free Book Online Page A

friends in the
city. Tell me about it, she thought. She clicked open the message.

What a waste of time. Got yet another pep talk: We love you, but the
economy sucks. We had to lay off so many people last fall, yadda yadda yadda . When does it
get easier, kiddo? You were the smart one, to get out when you did. I'll see
you tonight; tell Dakota to make a double batch of anything. Absolutely
ANYTHING. K.C.

p.s. Did you hire a publicist? I saw another bit about the store!
Something in the Daily News about celebs frequenting an
unnamed Upper West Side craft shop. Sweetheart: Are you holding out on me???

Nine years older and half a foot shorter, K.C. Silverman had been the newly
minted senior editor when Georgia was hardly more than a kid. Far from being
aloof, or adding yet another coffee to her list of daily duties, the always
energetic K.C. had shown Georgia the ropes when she started in book publishing,
even taking her to lunch when her pregnancy had started to show. Gradually
their professional roles had morphed into a kind of easy friendship that made
few demands of the other; certainly working in entirely different worlds made
it simpler. K.C. could talk about jobs she wanted, coworkers she hated, and
have both the satisfaction of knowing Georgia understood where she was coming
from and the relief that she wasn't going to tell on her. Not to mention the
value of having a friend who'd been around during the early days of James; K.C.
knew from Georgia's pain, having survived two short-lived marriages that
sputtered more than they failed. ("I did starter marriages before the
world knew from starter marriages," she insisted.)

In return for their friendship, K.C. had been buying wool and starting a new
sweater with regularity. That she never seemed to quite finish her projects,
well, Georgia sometimes offered to put it all together for her. What she did
with the rest of her half-knitted creations was anyone's guess. It was a
comfortable arrangement: they saw each other at the shop, talked easily,
e-mailed, but never really got together. They'd never been in each other's
homes even though they had known each other for fourteen years. Still, to be
fair, Georgia reminded herself, that wasn't really all that unusual in the
city. They had hardly even chatted on the phone. It was what it was—a very New
York kind of friendship—and yet each felt, in the city of strangers, that they
had a good friend in the other. But it wasn't like having a very best friend
whom she could call at all hours. With K.C. it was more a…relationship than a
friendship. K.C. was no kindred spirit. Just a nice enough person whose life
choices had meant her path intersected with Georgia's. And that was okay,
right? It had been a long, long time since Georgia had had the type of friend
who knew what you wanted to say even before you said it. Who was always in your
corner. Who actually enjoyed talking to you every day. And Georgia noticed the difference.

The Web results blipped onto the screen: two tickets to Edinburgh by way of
Heathrow. $1,473. Maybe we'll see you next year, Granny, she thought. I'll
bring Dakota when I win the lottery.

It had been years since she'd seen her grandmother Walker, and Georgia longed
to go, wanted to step back into an old ritual and sit under soft blankets
before a coal fire, knitting and talking. Georgia's father was a cheery man, a
hardworking Scottish emigrant in love with the size and possibility of his Pennsylvania
farm, but taciturn; his wife was the talker and the taskmaster. From her
earliest days, Georgia remembered disagreeing with her mother, a trend that
continued even now. Hers was the type of mother who was all empathy and caring
to just about everyone—the other members at her church thought Bess Walker was
simply precious—but to her own family, it was all about bucking up and being
ready for life's disasters. Not bad training for life, Georgia thought
privately sometimes, but not exactly the warm