The Yearbook

A man from her high school calls on a Wednesday with a Stamford area code and a question she doesn't quite know how to answer yet. He graduated from Wright Tech in 1981. Electrical shop. They shared a cafeteria for three years and then lost each other for forty-three. He found her on Classmates.com, read about her restaurant in a magazine, and wants to know if he can stop by sometime. She says come Friday. Nine-thirty. Things calm down around here by then. What follows is ninety minutes in a red leather booth — a 1981 yearbook open between them, snow falling past the window, Kahlúa on the rocks, and the slow discovery that the woman Lorri Oliver has become is not, in fact, finished wanting things. She is sixty years old. She owns a restaurant in Thornbury, Connecticut called Amorous. She has a bartender named Ginny who sees everything and says almost nothing and knew exactly when to turn off the bar lights and go home. This is where it starts. The Yearbook is a short work — the story of one evening. It is the first book in the Something in the Water series — a story about a woman in her second act who has decided, without apology, that desire is a serious subject and she intends to treat it that way. Finish the book. There's something waiting for you at the end.