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see if there’s anything tricky about the project. Maybe Cappy has asked him to do hypothetical odds based on practice runs. But no, it appears to be a straightforward case of dividing the numerator by the denominator and then multiplying by a hundred. Picking up the pencil I quickly perform one calculation for him.
    “Way cool, thanks,” Auggie says and studies my notation. “The ones with plain numbers, like odds of two-to-one made sense, but I couldn’t figure out what to do with six-fifths and the one and one-eighths. Sounds like an amount of scotch or something, huh?” He laughs good-heartedly at his own misunderstanding.
    Meantime, I’m thinking that a person unable to do basic math cannot possibly be any grandson of Cappy’s. He must be adopted. This is further evidenced by the stack of books on the desk that are
definitely
not Cappy’s—F. Scott Fitzgerald, Eudora Welty, Truman Capote, and Carson McCullers. But no, there’s too big a family resemblance, especially around the forehead, and I notice that he’s also left-handed like Cappy.
    “You like to read?” I ask.
    “Oh yeah,” he says. “And write, too. There’s not a lot to do until the local track opens next week so I’ve been catching up on my American authors.”
    “What do you write?”
    “Short stories, mostly about death. And I’m outlining this novel about a young guy who goes to work for a relative, like an uncle or something, who’s involved in gambling. I guess it sounds autobiographical but it really wouldn’t be.”
    “No, of course not,” I say.
    Auggie points down to a horse on the list named Prairie Gary and says with all the innocence of a happy novice set to lose his entire purse, “Look, Hallie, if that horse had won with those odds of twenty-to-one, you would have made two thousand dollars on a hundred-dollar bet!”
    “Huh?” I don’t know what it is but I keep losing my train of thought. The necklace crosses his Adam’s apple and a large red bead bounces up and down when he talks. Perhaps I’m being hypnotized.
    “If Prairie Gary won, he’d have paid out two grand!” exclaims Auggie.
    I quickly scan the page to see what kind of race it was and the other horses running. “But there really wasn’t any way he could win, because Prairie Gary is a turf horse and it was a dirt track. Ever hear the expression
horses for courses
? Well, that’s where it comes from.”
    “Wow.” He looks at me with the kind of admiration that parents and teachers and pastors, especially pastors, rarely employ when they discover that you have more than a passing familiarity with gambling. “You really do know your stuff!”
    Yeah, but is this what I want—to sit in some airless cave in the back of a grungy pool hall, multiplying and dividing all day long, waiting for the results to come in and figuring payouts? Then there are the occasional out-of-towners asking where they can find poker games and call girls, and not always in that order.
    “So I guess you came here to see Cappy,” says Auggie.
    “If he’s around,” I reply. “But it’s nothing urgent.” Cappy had apparently just hired Auggie and so it’s doubtful that he needs
two
assistants.
    “He took a ride up to Great Lakes Downs in Michigan to talk with some of the trainers and jockeys. You know Cappy, he doesn’t trust anyone until he looks them in the eye, including the horses.” Auggie gives me a knowing wink and from the way he grins it’s obvious that he idolizes his streetwise and well-connected grandfather. “Is there something I can help you with?”
    “Oh no, I—I just stopped by to say hello.” I start to back out of the room, because it’s getting awfully hot in here, or else I’m having my own personal summer. The place never felt quite this cramped or crowded before. “Did Cappy change the office around?”
    Auggie nods toward the gray metal filing cabinets precariously stacked on top of each other against the far wall. “I cleaned out the