Page 65 of Through The Woods

“How’s it going, Darlin?” Rooster poked his head in.

I held up the notebook. “Well, if I could come up with a menu, I’d be doing a lot better. Did you guys take care of alcohol?”

He grinned slyly. “Oh, we took care of the booze. I think we might need another building to store it all.”

I laughed and went back to tapping the pen against the blank page. I really needed some inspiration right about now.

Rooster sat down across from me. “What about brisket or chicken? We’ve got that big ass smoker just begging to be used.”

I thought it over. If we did a barbecue rub on them, then I could pair it with potato salad and baked beans. “Okay, that could work. If he’s planning on a hundred, then that means we’d need to look at roughly six to eight ounces of meat per person—I’m going to go with the higher number since the majority will be men. Eight hundred ounces—that puts us at fifty pounds. Maybe we could split and do twenty-five pounds of brisket and twenty-five pounds of chicken. I might need to add a couple of pounds in to account for water weight.”

Rooster’s mouth hung open. “Did you just do all that in your head?”

I nodded. “Doesn’t everyone?”

He shook his head. “No one I know.”

Doc came in and Rooster filled him on my ‘impressive’ calculating skills. He rubbed his hands together gleefully. “Okay, ninety-seven people want to drink. If we bought twenty-four cases of beer, will that be enough?” When I gave him a confused look he added, “I’m trying to make it harder for you.”

I grinned. “Well, a case of beer is twenty-four bottles. If you bought twenty-four cases, that gives you five hundred seventy-six beers. That means, out of the ninety-seven people coming, each person would get five point nine three beers. And with a hundred people, that leaves you with five point seven six beers per person. I don’t know about your friends, but if they drink like you guys, that’s not going to be enough.”

“Charm, you hearin’ this?” Rooster looked over into the doorway and I stopped talking.

“You always been this good with numbers?” His eyebrows furrowed in confusion.

I nodded. “Yeah, I love numbers—especially for stuff like this. It’s like a puzzle…”

Seeing the astounded faces, I self-consciously tucked a strand of hair behind my ear and looked away.

“Fifty-two crates.”

His voice was so quiet that I had to lean forward. “Excuse me?”

Charm looked me right in the eye. “Fifty-two crates. Let’s say that’s what I’ve got—figure I can make twelve thousand on each one.”

I didn’t ask the obvious question—which would’ve been, ‘What’s in the crates?’

No, my inner mathematician came out. “Fifty-two crates at twelve thousand each? So, you’d be looking at six hundred twenty-four thousand. Split eight ways, it’d still leave you with seventy-eight thousand per person. Although you probably wouldn’t just split it evenly eight ways—that’d be a little too simple. With you being ‘the Prez,’ surely your cut is bigger. So maybe we’re looking at twenty percent for you—one hundred twenty-four thousand eight hundred dollars. Still, the other guys would walk away with seventy-one thousand, three hundred fourteen dollars, and some change. Oh, but I didn’t factor in giving some back to the town—I’m probably completely off—”

Charm’s mouth hung open in shock and he held a hand up to stop me from continuing. “That’s insane.”

I shook my head. “No, it’s easy—you just multiply and divide. Anyone can do it.”

He laughed bitterly. “Not usually without the help of a calculator. Jesus, Honey. How’d some genius like yourself end up here?”

I shrugged. “I wanted to be the best. I found that I’d have to forfeit sleep in order to do that—got hooked on blow instead and well, here I am.”

Numbers had always been easy for me. It was like the problem was drawn out in front of me—I could see all the numbers and then it just became a matter of moving them around as needed to get my answer.

Charm clicked his tongue against his teeth and a flood of heat washed over me again. There was just something about him that left me feeling completely undone.

“Alright, let’s get back to work. I think Neve has this completely taken care of—might even save me a little money too.”

I found that I wanted to save him more than money; I wanted to save the parts of him that had obviously been lost when Rae died. While there had been brief glimpses of the man he was before, Charm had obviously hardened himself after losing her.

Rooster hung back. “Hey, I had a question for ya. You mentioned before that I was too obvious.”

I jotted down a few more party notes before answering. “I did say that.”

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