1 egg, beaten
Add up all that except the starter and what’s it come to?”
Sly rattled off, “almost ten cups of ingredients, plus one egg.”
Gwyneth stared at him openmouthed.
“What?” he asked.
“Nuthin’. So y’all are saying it’s about 12 1/2 cups of everything including the starter?”
“Correct.”
Gwyneth splayed her ten fingers on the floor, then said, “Sly, will you put two and a half fingers next to mine?”
He shook his head, smiling. “I think it might be easier to find the ratio on paper. Or, better yet, let me just tell you it’s a fifth.”
Gwyneth gasped. “A fifth! Well, now that can’t be right. Ain’t a fifth a big-ass bottle?”
Sly and Nathan both burst out laughing. Nathan extended his hand and helped Gwyneth up.
“What in tarnation is so dang funny? I’m tryin’ to help Sly and y’all are laughin’ at me.”
“Sorry, hon. He was just saying that the ratio is twenty percent or one fifth. If you divide the whole bottle into five parts, you’d need to add one of those parts of wine to the bottle to get the right ratio.”
“Oh. I do declare, Sly, how’d you know how to do that? Are you some math genius like Good Will Huntin’?”
He shrugged. “I was an engineer before the incident.”
“I see. So, drivin’ trains takes math?”
“I wasn’t…”
Nathan put a protective arm around her and gave Sly a quick head-shake.
He took one look at her confused face and said, “Never mind.” Explaining what an electro-mechanical engineer did might make her head explode.
Nathan gave her a side hug and said, “You know what, Gwyneth, I think you may be on to something. A job Sly could do.”
“Really? What’s that?”
“Math tutor.”
Sly straightened.Math tutor?It made sense.“I could tutor college kids after dark. Now that I have an apartment, they could come to me, or I could meet them somewhere.”
“And there’s all kinds of schools around. I’m sure some of them have math dummies like me,” Gwyneth said.
“And me,” Nathan added, quickly. “That’s what made me think of it. I needed a tutor in Trigonometry to get through high school.”
Gwyneth’s eyebrows rose. “Trigger what?”
“Not trigger…” He pronounced it slowly. “Trig-ah-nom-e-tree.”
“Oh. I thought with your Boston accent you were sayin’ trigger-somethin’.”
