He bent over the page. His fries were still untouched. A skin had begun to form on the idea of them, the way fries die, quietly, while a boy is elsewhere. Denise watched his hand. Emily watched the hand too, and also watched the room, because she was still a waitress, and table four’s water was low, and the man in the soccer jersey’s father was signaling with a kindness that would become irritation if ignored. She lifted a finger to him, the universal sign for I see you, and he sat back, partly mollified. The pot on the Porters’ table had gone from hot to warm. The inch of coffee in Denise’s cup had stopped trembling.
Caleb’s pencil scratched. 35 times 4t was 140t. 35 times 2 was 70. 70 plus 23 was 93. He wrote n = 140t + 93 and then stopped, the point on the paper this time, the opposite of hovering, a small dark period after the ninety-three as if the number had to be held in place or it would leave.
“Greater than fifty,” he said. “If t is zero, n is ninety-three. If t is one, it’s two hundred thirty-three, which is bigger. If t is negative, ninety-three minus one hundred forty is negative, and we wanted a positive integer. So ninety-three.”
He did not look up yet. He went back to the printed sheet and did the checking in a column, the way a person checks a lock by feel.
“Ninety-three divided by five,” he said. “Eighteen times five is ninety. Remainder three. That matches. Ninety-three divided by seven. Thirteen times seven is ninety-one. Remainder two. That matches the real sheet, not my twelve. Ninety-three divided by four. Twenty-three times four is ninety-two. Remainder one. All three. Greater than fifty. Smallest, because the next one is a whole cycle away.”