She trusted the book as she had trusted him; there was no one who could cast a horoscope like Simon, when he was sober - half the time he had not even needed to refer to the book, he knew it so well.  She knew that she would never have that degree of skill, so she always referred to the almanac and to the manual.  Her calculations were sometimes a little fuzzy, for the same reason that her checkbook sometimes did not balance; Becky Vesey (as she had been known as a child) had never really mastered the multiplication tables and she was inclined to confuse sevens with nines.