A Year in Reading: Emme Lund
January 2021. There was something like hope. The world (or my view of it from Portland, Ore.) was cold and gray, we were still locked inside, washing our hands after every trip to the grocery store, but I knew people who had gotten the Covid vaccine, friends who were doctors and nurses. There was a different old man getting ready to take over the presidency. I wasn’t expecting things to get better, but I thought they might not get worse, something like stalled progress. I read s , a novella about the final shift at a Red Lobster before the location permanently closed. I had spent the decade before 2020 working in restaurants, performing every task from cook to bartender to manager. In March 2020, I went to work as a bartender for the last time for over a year without realizing it. There was no fanfare. No celebratory “last night slinging drinks.” My coworkers and I left the restaurant for the final time together, too scared to hug one another. In the months that followed, a.
