“So how does a pension actuary differ from the other kind?” Brad asked. He leaned forward in his chair and the buttons pulled across the belly of his blue shirt.

“Actually, it’s just an alphabetic matter,” Susan explained. He heard the smile in her voice and saw it in her eyes. She’d just spent most of their entree time describing what an actuary does. Her brother was trying a career switch – after 25 years of moving around the world with his wife’s job in the State Department, he was newly-divorced, cut loose, back home at 48 and needing a plan. His kids were grown and on their own. His ex was in Cambodia. He’d read that the profession with the lowest stress was that of actuary, and he’d come to Susan to talk.

Their desserts arrived. He was two bites into his creme brulee and Susan tasted her grapefruit soup before she continued. “See, it’s all a matter of statistics. And probabilities built off them. You start with 100,000 people born in a year and count how many are alive each year after. The difference is simply the number who died. The number who lived, divided by the starting number, is the probability of living that year. The number who died, divided by the starting number, is the probability of death. The two probabilities always equal one.

“The insurance actuary deals with probability of death. The functions he uses happen to be expressed with the letters C and M. The pension actuary takes the opposite – the probability of life. His functions are D and N. It doesn’t matter. It’s all the same math. Two parts of the ultimate One.” She patted her mouth with her napkin.

Brad eye-flirted with their waiter, two tables away. It wasn’t sexual; he just wanted his espresso before he finished dessert. Also he wanted the staff to recognize him. He and Susan had been there for lunch two Fridays in a row and they were personable and generous; it shouldn’t take long before they were greeted with familiarity and seated with what felt like priority. All his life Brad had been an outgoing hospitable guy. The years abroad, with house servants and an expatriate cocktail life, hadn’t slowed him down.

For that matter, and for an actuary, Susan wasn’t a social slouch either. Their family of origin was argumentative and passionate, and they’d had to learn to get along and get a word in or they wouldn’t have been allowed words at all. Both of them could put people at ease, make them laugh, or get them talking.

Brad caught the waiter’s eyes, who in turn signaled with his brows and chin that coffee was the next task he’d set himself. He mimed a run toward the bar and soon returned with the double macchiato.

“Maybe I should give it a try,” Brad ventured as he stirred in his foam.

“Actuary?”

“Yeah. It looks like you could use some help in the office.” He had been working there over the past week and a half, cleaning Susan’s server and defragging her office PCs…generally tweaking her electronics. He couldn’t fail to notice that she labored longer and harder than her three employees and still had too much to do. “Not like I’d be any kind of actuary any time soon,” he continued. “But you seem to have to do a lot of non-actuarial shit, too…maybe I can help with some of that.”

She put her spoon down. “I’ve always said I wanted a manager,” she stated. “Or a wife.” They smiled across the table. “What the hell: let’s try it.” Picking up her spoon again, she added, “Keep you off the street.”

She considered her accidental career. She hadn’t even known what an actuary was when she took the clerk/typist position at age 22. She was a hippie who thought of herself as a beatnik, who’d turned her back on her math aptitude to be avant garde and write, who landed while awaiting grad school (English, for the writing) in a small stressed office, who quickly came to like the job more than the school and the numbers more than the words.

“Hanging with the Hassids,” was what one of her college friends said when Susan told him she was going to be an actuary. And it’s true that the field drew as many of that Jewish sect as the diamond industry in New York. Some of the professional conferences looked like rabbinical schools. But actuaries also were made from computer-oriented math nerds, from school-age bookies and pot head hackers. There weren’t many forelocks and black hats among the small-plan pension actuaries, and that was Susan’s cohort. There weren’t many women either.

Their waiter paused by their table and offered her more regular coffee. He was at least ten years older than Susan so she knew he’d understand her hesitation at 2 p.m. He told them he worked 12 hour days – 10 to 10 – so caffeine was still his friend, but he pointed out that espresso packs less punch than brew, and suggested a drink like Brad’s. She thought about it. She opted for a glass of Pinot Grigio instead. That made Brad raise his brows, because Susan was the least inclined in their family to drink. He was about to comment when they were all distracted by parade-type activity in the street.