The Bright Forever by Lee Martin

red polish on her toenails. Mr. Dees had noticed that right away when she came downstairs for her lesson, and even now he could smell the polish. He didn’t approve. Nail polish for a nine-year-old. What sense did that make? He wondered whether he should say something to Mrs. Mackey, then thought better of it, understanding that he was there to teach arithmetic and not to offer advice on parenting. Him, the bachelor. Him, the odd duck. Oh, he knew how people talked. What in the world could he possibly know about raising a child?
    He uncapped his fountain pen and tapped the nib beside the problem he had neatly written on a tablet page. He took great pride in his penmanship. It looked, so the teller at the savings and loan had remarked yesterday, like something out of a handwriting instruction book. “A careful man writes a careful hand,” his mother had taught him, and he had practiced the Palmer Method until each letter was perfect. “Just look at your signature on this deposit slip,” the teller had said. “You’d think a woman signed it. Not many men have pretty writing like that.”
    If a herd has fifty-six zebras, and someone wants to separate a fourth of them from the herd, how many will he have to move?
    A story problem requiring work with fractions. Solving story problems, Mr. Dees told Katie, was a matter of translating a word sentence into a number sentence: 56/1 X 1/4 in this instance. “You see, we have fifty-six zebras.” His pen scratched over the pad as he wrote the equation. Katie was fascinated with the pen. Could she hold it? she wanted to know. Could she use it to work out the problem? “If you get this problem right,” Mr. Dees said, “I’ll let you use the pen. In fact, if you get this right, I’ll buy you one of your own. Now, fifty-six zebras, and we have to take a fourth of them away.” He held his eyeglasses at the left temple, straightening them. His hair—he had again let it grow too long—flopped over his forehead, and he had to lay his pen down and use his fingers to comb the hair out of his eyes. The air around him smelled of ink and paper and Katie’s shampoo—the delightful scent of strawberries—and that nail polish that Mr. Dees couldn’t get out of his head.
    Katie tapped her teeth with her pencil’s eraser. “Fifty-six zebras,” she said. “Holy moly, that’s a lot of stripes.”
    “Katie.” Mr. Dees gently closed his fingers around her wrist and moved her hand away from her mouth. “Concentrate. How would you multiply fifty-six by one-fourth?”
    “I’d times the top numbers and the bottom numbers.”
    “What do we call the top numbers?”
    “The numerators.”
    “Good. And the bottom?”
    “The nominators.”
    “De-nominators,” Mr. Dees said.
    “De-nominators.” Katie drew an equal sign at the right of the equation and then wrote the fraction 56/4. “Fifty-six times one,” she said, “equals fifty-six, and one times four equals four.”
    “Yes. Good. Now what do you have to do?”
    “Simplify.”
    “Right. And how do you do that?”
    “Divide fifty-six by four.” Katie leaned over the tablet, her hair falling down across her arm as she worked the problem. “Four goes into five once with one left over. Bring down the six. Four goes into sixteen four times.” She slapped her pencil down on the tablet and grabbed Mr. Dees around his arm. “Fourteen zebras,” she said. “Holy moly, Mr. Dees. Fourteen.”
    The look on her face—a look of unexpected pleasure—overwhelmed him. What delight there was in her eyes, in her open mouth, in the way her warm fingers curled across his arm. Had fractions ever blessed a child to this degree? It was as if she had been lost in darkness and now had come out into the light, saved. Holy moly. What could he do, but take her hand in his and lift her arm and declare her “Katie, Champion of Fractions,” and to hand over his pen to her, as he had promised, so she could use it to figure out the next