“Forty-two.”

Ayako shook her head, sighing in frustration. “No, honey. It’s nineteen. See, we subtract x from both sides, and…”

Ranko shrugged, crossing her arms over the chest of her purple dress. What do you expect, Aya, making me come in early on a Sunday to do math? And when Akane’s got an important volleyball game I could be at instead? “Nabiki says 42 is the answer to life, the universe and everything. Well, this is part of everything.”

“Are you going to take this seriously, little sister?” Ayako tossed her pencil in the air with an exasperated laugh. “You’ve got to pass this class, unless you want to be cheerleading at Yusue until you’re forty.”

“Forty-two,” Ranko said with a little giggle. “Honestly, Aya, it’s not that I don’t want to take it serious, I just don’t get it at all. Like, I was having a hard enough time with numbers and then they went and put letters in there too, just to fuck with me. Next year, if they try to make me divide by the kanji for squirrel, I swear, Ayako, I’m out.”

“Alright, look. Let’s go back to the beginning.” Ayako took a sip from her soda through a plastic straw, careful not to let the condensation from the glass make contact with Ranko’s homework. “Wait here. I’ve got an idea.”

Ranko’s eldest sister disappeared into the Phoenix kitchen, returning to the round VIP table with a large tray of lemons for the night’s service and a handful of styrofoam takeout containers.

“We’re gonna cut garnishes? I mean, that seems more productive than this, but I don’t get how it’s s’posedta make me pass math.” Ranko shrugged, putting her feet up on the empty chair between herself and Ayako as her sister retook her seat.

Ayako set the tray on the seat of one of the chairs, hiding it under the table. She picked up a handful of lemons, throwing some of them into one of the takeout containers and closing it in her lap, out of Ranko’s view. Placing the styrofoam container and four lemons on the table, she tapped Ranko’s foot to get her attention. “Okay. So, you know you’ve got four lemons right here. You see that?”

Ranko nodded. “I suck at math, Aya, but I can count…”

“Okay. Now.” Ayako shook the container, letting it make a little tumbling noise. “So, we know there’s some lemons in this box, but we don’t know how many. Right?”

“I guess…”

“Great. So if you know you have ten lemons total, how many are in the box?” Ayako smiled hopefully. Please get this, honey. I can’t dumb it down any more for you.

“Six. Duh!” Ranko laughed. “When are you gonna get to the hard stuff?”

With a wide smile, Ayako offered a high-five to her little sister. “Yes! Now, walk me through it. How’d you figure it out?”

Ranko scoffed dismissively. “Well, if I know I have ten lemons, and I know about these four here…” She reached over the table, picking them up and taking them off the table. “Then there has to be six in the box. Right? What am I missing here?”

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Grinning, Akayo nodded. “Nothing. That’s exactly right. Now, watch.” Using one of her fingernails, Ayako scratched two perpendicular diagonal lines into the lid of the styrofoam box. “There. Now this box is x.”

She picked up her pencil, writing x + 4 = 10 on a blank page in Ranko’s notebook. “So, you knew you had ten lemons.” She pointed at the 10 with the tip of the pencil. “You knew about four of them, so we can remove that from the table, and from the total.” She wrote a -4 on each side of the equality sign. “Now, the four on the table are gone…” She scratched out the two numerals on the left side of the equation. “... and there’s four less that could be in the box, too. So what are we left with?” She scratched out the + 4 and the - 4 from the left side of the equation indicating they had canceled each other out.

Ranko sat up, her eyes widening. “X equals six.”

“There you go! See, honey, it’s not magic! It’s just using symbols to describe common sense.” Ayako grinned, picking up another styrofoam container and etching another cross into its lid. She pulled it under the table, putting a few fruits in it and returning it to the tabletop, before picking up the box that had already been there and adjusting the number of fruits in it as well.

“Okay. So if we have two boxes with the same number of lemons, and you have 8 total lemons, how many are in each box?”

“Four. You just take half the numbers, and that’s it. Easy!” Ranko smiled as Ayako wrote the equivalent 2x = 8 formula in the notebook and walked through the division that matched Ranko’s logic.

“Are you girls just about done with my ingredients?” A laugh came from behind the counter, and Ayako looked up with a grin. “Not right now, mama! We’re making progress over here!”

“Okay, Ranko, now what about this?” Ayako put three more lemons on the table, leaving the boxes unchanged. “Now you’ve got 11 lemons. What would you do?”

Ranko beamed, relieved to be starting to understand. “Well, first I’d get rid of the three, and then be back to just the bo…” She was interrupted by a loud buzzing coming from the kitchen.

“Damn,” Hana called out as she scrubbed the inside of Yui’s well. “Could one of you girls get that? It’s probably just the beer keg guy, but I’m up to my elbows in suds.”

Ranko stood, grinning at Ayako gratefully. “I got it, Mom.”

Hana nodded, tossing the scrub brush back in the sink and wiping her brow with her forearm. “Thanks, baby.”

Pushing through the blue saloon doors, Ranko hummed to herself as she approached the steel door leading out through the back of the kitchen into the alleyway. She pushed the door open, finding no one in the alley at all.

“What the hell?”

She stepped through the door into the alley, craning her neck to look around for whomever might have rung the doorbell. A prank? Did somebody get lost? She frowned at the sight of the square wooden table still leaning against the dumpster, the one she’d broken a few days prior in front of a customer in a fit of despair. I really gotta get better control of myself. I still can’t believe I did that. Freakin’ stupid.

“Hello?!” Ranko held her skirt down as a gust of wind whistled past her, tickling her bare legs. But it wasn’t the sudden chill of the air that made her freeze, it was the gravely masculine voice that came from behind a pile of empty plastic soda pallets over her left shoulder. One that was all too familiar. One she’d heard in her nightmares every night for weeks.

“Hello, Ranma.”