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Read an excerpt from Knit Two (Continued...)

That Georgia's yarn shop was the place where an unlikely group of women became friends around the table in the center of the room. Where Anita, the elegant older woman who was Georgia's biggest supporter, learned to accept Catherine, Georgia's old high school friend, and cheered as Catherine rediscovered her own capacity for self-respect and left an empty and unfulfilling marriage. It was at Georgia's that dour and lonely graduate student Darwin found a true friend in director Lucie, who had embarked on first-time motherhood in her forties, and that Darwin realized just how much she wanted to sustain her marriage to her husband, Dan, after a brief night of infidelity. It was at Georgia's store that her employee Peri admitted she didn't want to go to law school, and at Georgia's store that her longtime friend KC confessed that she did. It was here that Georgia's former flame, James, had walked back into her life and the two discovered their love had never lost its spark. And it was at the store that Georgia and James's only child, Dakota, had once done her homework and shared her homemade muffins with her mother's friends and flaked out on the couch in her mother's office, waiting for the workday to be finished so the two of them could eat a simple supper and go on up to bed in the apartment upstairs.

And if that all had happened, then it also meant that Georgia Walker had fallen ill with late-stage ovarian cancer and died unexpectedly from complications, leaving her group to manage on without her.

For just over five years they'd all kept on just as they'd done—still meeting up for regular get-togethers even though KC never picked up a stick and Darwin's mistake-ridden sweater for her husband remained the most complex item she'd ever put together—and Peri had left everything mostly the same in the store. Year after year, she resisted her impulse to change the décor, to redesign the lavender bags with the Walker and Daughter logo, to muck out the back office with its faded couch or to update the old wooden table that anchored the room. She kept everything intact and ran the store with the energy and attention to detail Georgia had demonstrated, had turned a profit every quarter—always doing best in winter, of course—and furiously created her line of knitted and felted handbags with every spare moment. She even found the energy to branch out in new lines, new designs.

Until, finally, she'd had enough working on her handbags late at night and never feeling rested. She put down her needles and jammed out an email in the middle of the night. She required a meeting, she'd written, had broached the remodel. It had been an impossible concept, of course, the idea of changing things. And it took a long while for Anita and Dakota to agree. Still, Peri stood firm, and ultimately the wall came down, some new paint went up, and even the always serviceable chairs around the center table were replaced with cushier, newly upholstered versions. The shop was revitalized: still cozy, but fresher and sleeker. As a surprise—and in an attempt to woo Dakota's emotional approval—Peri had asked Lucie to print an outtake from her documentary about the shop, the first film she had shown in the festival circuit, and had framed a photograph of Dakota and Georgia ringing up sales together, back when Dakota was only twelve and Georgia was robustly healthy. Appropriately, the picture hung behind the register, the Walker and Daughter logo next to it.

"She would have liked that," Dakota said, nodding. "But I don't know about the changes to the store. Maybe we should put the wall back up."

"Georgia believed in forging ahead," said Peri. "She tried new things with the shop. Think of the club, for example."

"I dunno," said Dakota. "What if I forget what it used to be like? What if it all just fades away? Then what?"

Tonight, for the first time, the entire group would see the updated store in its completed form. It was a pleasantly warm April night, and the Friday Night Knitting Club was getting together for its regular monthly meeting. Whereas once the women had gathered in Georgia's store every week, the combination of their busy careers and changing family situations made it more difficult to meet as often as they once did. And yet every meeting began with hugs and kisses and a launch, without preamble, into the serious dramas of their days. There was no pretense with these women anymore, no concern about how they looked or how they acted, just a sense of community that didn't change whether they saw each other once a week or once a year. It had been Georgia's final and most beautiful gift to each of them: the gift of true and unconditional sisterhood.

But if time had not changed their feelings for one another, it had not spared the natural toll on their bodies and their careers and their love lives and their hair. Much had happened in the preceding five years.

KC Silverman had made law review at Columbia, passed the bar with flying colors, and ended up back at Churchill Publishing—the very company that had laid her off from her editorial job five years ago—as part of in-house counsel.

"Finally, I'm invaluable," she had told the group upon starting the job. "I know every side of the business."

Her new salary was transformed, with some guidance from Peri, into a fabulous collection of suits. And her hair was longer than the pixie cut she'd had in the old days, shaped into a more lawyerly layered style. She'd experimented—for a millisecond—with letting her hair go its natural gray but she decided she was too young for that much seriousness at fifty-two and opted for a light brown.

"If I had your gorgeous silver," she told Anita, "it would be a different story."

Lucie Brennan's documentary circulating on the festival circuit had led to a gig directing a video for a musician who liked to knit at Walker and Daughter. When the song went to the Top Ten in Billboard, Lucie quickly transitioned from part-time producer for local cable to directing a steady stream of music videos, her little girl Ginger lip-synching by her side in footie pajamas.

At forty-eight, she was busier and more successful than she ever imagined—and her apartment reflected the change. She no longer rented, but had purchased a high and sunny two-bedroom on the Upper West Side with a gorgeous camelback sofa that Lucie, still an occasional insomniac, would curl up on in the middle of the night. Only now, instead of knitting herself to sleep, she typically mapped out shots for the next day's shoot.

And the tortoiseshell glasses she'd once worn every day had been joined by an array of frames and contacts for her blue eyes. Her hair, if left to its natural sandy brown, was quite ... salty. So she colored it just a few shades darker than little Ginger's strawberry blond, aiming for a russet shade.

Darwin Chiu finished her dissertation, published her very first book (on the convergence of craft, the Internet, and the women's movement) based on her research at Walker and Daughter, and secured a teaching job at Hunter College while her husband, Dan Leung, found a spot at a local ER. They also found a small apartment on the East Side, close to the hospital and college, the living room walls lined with inexpensive bookshelves overflowing with papers and notes. Unlike other women, Darwin's hair was free of gray though she'd hit her thirties, and she still wore it long, without bangs, making her look almost as young as her women's studies students.

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