Page 79 of Only in Your Dreams

Ingrid Reeves, who may very well be the only person in this diner more exhausted than me, blows out a breath so impressively loud that I can hear it over the shrillvroom vroomsounds coming from the six-year-olds playing with their cars behind me. She and her eight-year-old son Killian are always here over two plates of pancakes whenever I work a morning shift. Her husband was our physical education teacher while I was in the seventh grade, before he joined the military.

“The food is perfect as always,” Ingrid sighs. “You want to know what’s not so perfect? Trying to run through your kid’s homework when I’m working off half a brain cell this morning, and nearly flunked all my math classes as a kid, anyway. Sean usually handles homework duty when he isn’t deployed.”

I pull a face, peering at her son’s workbook as he gnaws on the end of his pencil. “Whatcha working on today, bud?”

Killian answers by way of a wordless grumble.

“They’re onto probabilities now, which makes perfect sense given the probability of my being able to make him care about this is precisely zero,” Ingrid supplies, with a sip of orange juice.

I slide into the booth next to Killian. “You mind if I have a look?”

He shoves the workbook in my direction. “Numbers are boring,” he announces.

“Hmm, I’m not so sure I agree with that. You just need to get the hang of them, and then something really cool starts to happen.”

“What does?”

“They start telling you a story.” I peruse the page he’s stuck on. “What would you rather be doing if you weren’t studying math?”

“Watching football,” he says morosely, bitter that I’m reminding him. “The Huskies have their home opener on Friday, but Mom says we can’t go because Grandma Janet is visiting from Ireland and we can’t afford three tickets.”

Of course. This town really does live and die by football.

Across the table, Ingrid lifts her gaze to the ceiling as though begging the heavens for patience.

“Well, I can’t do much about Grandma Janet visiting, but I can probably help you out with this.” I answer Ingrid’s inquisitive look with a shrug. “I’m only a part time server. I work in data analysis on the side.”

Or maybe I’m a server on the side. Honestly, I can barely make sense of how I split my week anymore.

“Okay, so forget about all those funny drawings in this book and humor me for a minute,” I tell Killian. I pull straws out of the table-side dispenser and lay them out as yard lines across the table, then pick up a brown sugar packet. “Let’s say this is your quarterback—”

“Irving,” Killian pipes up with a sage nod. “The best quarterback the Huskies have ever seen.”

“Yes, Noah Irving. Excellent quarterback,” I agree. “So, it’s the Huskies home opener, right? And he’s on the field, lining up a pass, but the other team is closing in on him fast.” I pick up a handful of white sugar packets and scatter them around my makeshift football field, dot two brown sugar packets among them. “The white packets are the bad guys, and these two brown ones are the only Huskies open—”

“One of them can be Hudson Jones,” he adds. “Freshman, wide receiver, joined the team just last week.”

Zac and I have taken to calling him Baby Clark Kent, but Hudson Jones it is.

“Sure thing. So, it’s just Hudson and this other guy open, and they’re surrounded by five opposing players. What are the chances a Husky gets that ball?”

“Well,” Killian drawls. “If Irving fakes to the left—”

I chuckle, contemplating my makeshift field and the way the sugar packets are scattered. “You’re probably right. If he fakes to Hudson, this other guy might be able to take the handoff. But let’s focus on the numbers, bud. We’ll leave the rest to his coaches.” I point to the table. “There are two Huskies and five bad guys.”

“The ball will probably hit a bad guy.”

“Right. And what are the chances the ball makes it to a Husky?”

Killian purses his lips, staring down at the mess of straws and sugar packets before him. “Only two out of seven?”

“Nailed it.” I pick a berry off his plate and mime throwing it across the straw field until it lands on a white sugar packet.

Killian sinks down on the bench with an aggrieved sigh. “Dad’s right. The Huskiesarelosers.”

Shit. Probably should have reversed that example.

“Look,” I say loudly, drawing his workbook closer. “It’s the same thing with these weird-looking marbles in the book. See? Two plain marbles, five with the squiggles on the inside.”

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