Chapter 21

I finally gathered myself together and went inside the house, ready to face the music for my earlier antics with Don. There was a war party gathered in the living room, but all their talking abruptly ended the minute I walked into their midst.

"Kenny, we all decided you owe Emily an apology for what you did tonight." Joyce was sitting right next to Emily when she told me this. Brenda was on her other side, and Shirley was over on the other sofa, changing Derek's diaper for him.

"An apology for what?" I was still having my fun at this point. This was probably because I didn't understand the way a woman's mind worked, or realize that, as with any pack of animals, women would band together to fight off any attacks from an outside threat. As a man, I was considered, at least in this particular situation, as an outsider.

"Don't play the innocent with us, Kenny Parsons. You know you did this to her deliberately." Brenda spoke the words as if she really meant them, but I could tell she was only pretending to be angry, trying to show her solidarity with the other girls in the group.

"If you're speaking about what Don and I are planning, I can't see why I need to apologize for that. I know you and Joyce both said you wanted to watch it happen if I ended up doing that to her. We all know Emily needs to be punished, for what she was trying to do to Joyce before. Emily knows that too, don't you?"

Emily had her eyes cast down. She seemed content, for once, to play the role of the poor, downtrodden, martyr. It was a role that didn't suit her. She was fiery in temperament, and ready, at all times, to resist any sort of pressure.

Her only weakness in her effort at maintaining this resistance, would be her need to be made to submit. When she felt any guilt, about anything, she wanted to be conquered and punished. She didn't want to prevail, because by prevailing, she would be denied the incredible release that such a delicious humiliation might offer. I watched her closely, waiting for my answer.

She really didn't want my threat withdrawn, but she could never come out and admit this to Joyce, or to the other two X's. I thought Joyce and Brenda should have known and understood this by now. They had both seen, and participated, along with me, in some of Emily's sexual frenzy's. She always was at her wildest, and was most responsive, when being dominated and controlled.

"You've scared her, Kenny. Look at her, she's afraid to say anything to you." Joyce had to be kidding, or else she too was playing a role. If she was though, who was she playing it for? Who was the audience? If I was sure of anything, it was that Joyce knew what was really going on. Why was she going along with Emily on this?

"I'm thinking of inviting Don to come to Ridgeline this next weekend." Emily's head shot up, causing her to stare right at me. I smiled at her, and she lowered her head again. "He'll probably be sleeping in our room, Joyce. I don't want any of you other girls bothering him this weekend." As soon as I said that Don would be sleeping in our room, Joyce's face flushed, and she moved a little bit away from Emily. I wanted her to see that Emily didn't necessarily have to be the only one I thought needed punishment.

After saying that, I slowly walked back to our bedroom, knowing that the girls were going to spend the next half hour trying to decide what I'd meant with this last statement. I thought it had all gone quite well. Of course, there was no way I was going to invite Don to go home with us the next weekend. I just wanted to see what effect my saying I was, would have on all of them. Joyce needed to understand that she too was capable of being held accountable for her actions.

I was almost asleep by the time Emily and Joyce crawled into bed with me. It was supposed to be one of my nights to choose, and I was certain I hadn't asked Emily to join Joyce and me. I was about to ask Joyce why Emily was here in our bed, when she and Emily started attacking me. I found out, in the time it took to slide my hand between their legs, that both of them had already worked themselves up to a fever pitch.

After they had used me to the point where I was absolutely finished, Emily snuggled in next to me. She and Joyce spent the last five minutes of me being awake enough to hear them, promising to be better, and telling me that they really didn't need to be punished in the way I was planning. To me, it sounded like Joyce was being sincere, but Emily sounded like Brer Rabbit trying to get Brer Fox to please not throw him into the briar patch. I finally told them both that I'd think about it, but that I couldn't make them any promises.

The rest of the week was more of the same, with all the girls. Each one wanted to be certain that I wasn't planning on sharing them with Don too. The strange part of it was, each of them were more excited, due to having the uncertainty about what I might be planning for them.

I believed three of them when they said they didn't want me to share them with Don. The fear that I might actually do something like that might have been pleasurable for them, but they seemed like they didn't really want to make that titillating fear into an actual reality. That's what they all said to me, more or less. Emily was the only one that kept coming back to me to keep pleading her case. She practically wore me out with the hard sex she seemed to need me to provide her. Joyce and Brenda both benefited from her increased excitement as well.

Having a whole house full of turned on women, probably sounds better than it really was. I wondered how I could arrange things so that it only worked that way on one of them at a time. I had difficulty taking care of my responsibilities for the remainder of that week. I knew I only had myself to blame.

Thursday, at dinner, I told them that Don wasn't going to be able to travel home with us that weekend, due to his prior commitments. All the girls looked around at each other, trying to see how each was reacting to my news. Brenda and Joyce both looked disappointed. Emily looked relieved. Shirley seemed unmoved by it. I wondered if Brenda and Joyce were disappointed because they had wanted to watch, or because they had hopes of participating too?

Things settled back down to normal again. The episode with Sue Ellen was closed in all our minds. The excitement and worry about my plans for possibly sharing them with Don, had somehow drawn each of them closer together. I still hadn't discovered how they really felt about the idea of having another guy. I already was certain that I didn't want to share them that way though.

One of the outcomes of this was that their new closeness ended up changing the balance of our group dynamic. Before, it had been me, and the four girls. After they had banded together, trying to talk me out of sharing them with Don, it became the four girls and me. Together now, they sensed their combined strength was greater than mine was alone. This was probably a lot healthier way for them to look at it, but it took me awhile to adjust to the subtle differences this change was bringing to us. In the past, although we'd never specifically stated it, I'd always known that I could have my way, if I just fought for it enough. Now, I knew I could be overruled. More importantly, they knew it too.

On March 29th, 1988, a Tuesday, my son, Anthony Dwaine Parsons was born. It had been a relatively easy birth for Emily, with only three and a half hours of real labor. We all skipped classes to be there in the hospital with her. Standing by her bed, watching as Emily held our son in her arms, I knew that we now had an unbreakable connection. I felt the closeness of our shared responsibility and joy.

April 12th, another Tuesday, April Elizabeth Parsons was born to Brenda and me. April Elizabeth was the fifth or sixth name change Mama had come up with since she had first announced the names for Brenda's baby. The name, if it had been a boy, had never been changed though. Mama was with us as soon as Brenda got to the hospital, having Hans drive her to Lawrence. She hadn't done that when Emily went into labor. This was just further confirmation that this child was going to be very special to her.

This had been a longer and more difficult labor than Emily had experienced, but, at ten hours, it wasn't considered a hard child birth by any of the hospital staff. Brenda herself was very upset that Emily's birthing experience had been so much easier than hers. April had Brenda's skin tone and hair coloring. Mama was almost beside herself about the two new babies, although most of her attention was centered on April.

They had put a rocker in Brenda's recovery room, and, when the nurse handed April into her grandmother's arms, the look on Mama's face made me cry. I'd never seen her so contented. The frown lines on her forehead and around her eyes disappeared for a moment or two. I felt like I had given her back something for all she had given to me.

As she held the baby against her bosom, the entire room full of people could see her relax around her precious cargo. I remember thinking that April was a very lucky baby. When Tony was born, everyone made a big fuss over him, but it was like nothing compared to what they made over April. Even Walt and Richard came up to see the new baby.

Walt made a comment about how April's facial characteristics resembled his late mother's, and I didn't have the heart to mention the improbability since there wasn't any blood connection between Brenda and him.

To him, in spite of Georgia's oft repeated claims to the contrary, Brenda was, and always would be, his daughter. I knew that Brenda felt the same way. As long as there was a love connection between the two of them, did the blood relationship really matter?

I felt that way about my Dad and about Mama, although, in Mama's case, there really was a blood connection. I had been worried about Brenda and I having a child, because she was my half niece. We too shared a blood connection. I rationalized that it was about equal to being first cousins. Still, I was relieved when the nurses told me that April was a perfect little baby.

Shirley and Joyce were both due in mid to late July. We had tried to get Brenda to move back to Ridgeline, to have the baby, but she had refused to go. She wanted to be with us.

We had hired two new girls to help with the babies. As soon as April was born, we hired a third. These were all young girls that we hired from a public service agency that specialized in helping with the transitions of young adults, from foster home living, to an independent lifestyle. We converted three small upstairs rooms, all next to a giant nursery conversion we did in Brenda's bedroom. She spent most of her nights in with Emily or Joyce and me anyway, and there was still a smaller room in Emily's wing, with a king sized bed for her use, if she ever wanted or needed to make use of it.

Joyce was put in charge of hiring, and overseeing the training and the work schedules for the new, young, helpers. A lot of her time was spent with assisting the girls in also getting all the training they would need to really be independent people. When they came to us, none of them could drive, and only Irma had successfully completed her high school education. Joyce put Helen and Connie, the other two girls into night classes to get their diplomas. Our entourage had gotten substantially bigger, with two new babies and three new live in staff.

Brenda was using both Claire and Thelma to help her in the kitchen, and we hired another day worker to assist Christine with the housekeeping duties. Her name was Memphis Evans, and she was a robust black woman, with boundless energy, and an infectious smile for everyone. On her application, she gave her age as thirty nine, but we later discovered that she had lied by at least ten years. Her son, Richard, who we later hired to assist Phil with the gardening and general clean up duties, was thirty one years old. He was her third eldest child.

Emily, Joyce, and Shirley were all very good planners and organizers. Brenda was organized in the kitchen, and with shopping for things we needed for the house. She was also organized about all her beauty aids. She wasn't good at getting things done on time, except for her cooking. I wasn't that well organized either, but I could be, if it became necessary. We all had plenty of discussions about the logistics of our weekend moves from one house to the other.

I tried several times to volunteer to help get us ready, offering to at least help carry things that were ready to go, out to the cars, but they wouldn't let me. They chased me back into my office, telling me to stay out of their way. I found out later that Joyce had told them I usually averaged over four thousand dollars an hour in trading profits when I was trading futures. She had convinced all of them that I needed to not be distracted, by anything, in order to be able to maintain that high level of trading performance.

I don't know if either statement was accurate. Trading profits didn't come by the hour, but by the trade, and I usually sat in my office, reading about past market actions, or going over previous trading results, trying to spot new trends or directions, from previous market movements. In a way, I really spent most of my time goofing off, not really doing anything very productive. Maybe Joyce was right though, because my best trading performances usually came in a short flurry of activity, when I felt like I understood what the market was trying to tell me.

I had once had this experience where there were three different colored lines streaming from left to right in my head, representing the price interaction of grain contracts for three separate grains. When I closed my eyes, I could see them clearly. It was like three wavy lines that were merging and separating from each other. I traded against the extremes of those lines, by selling one and buying the other two, then reversing the trade whenever the lines started to converge back together again.

It had nothing to do with the grain fundamentals, or even with the absolute price of any grain, just with the price movement I was seeing in my head. It worked so well, I started crossing all three contracts with each other, kind of like juggling three different objects. Every time one would come down, I'd buy it, and hold it until I thought it had peaked in its ascendency. Doing that resulted in my making far more trades each hour. This lasted for three full trading days, and then I got this terrible headache, and the lines in my head disappeared. I closed out all my positions, as soon as I lost the lines.

A week later, I checked closely over the sum totals for all the trading activity I'd done in that single three day period. Deducting for the few losses I'd incurred, when I closed out my remaining positions, I still cleared over a million dollars from that trading flurry. It was a very substantial improvement over the results I'd been able to get trading my regular trading program, which I'd had running in the background, over the three day period, as well.

Most of the time I spent alone in my office, was taken up with me trying to put my mind back in a place where I could have those colored lines streaming through my head again. I had managed one or two lines again, frequently, but still hadn't discovered how to get the three line wave back. I had hopes of someday bringing a four line stream together. If that happened, I was going to make some really serious money trading.

I had discussed this with Joyce, Mama, and, to a lesser extent with Dad. I was surprised when none of them dismissed what I told them as being fanciful or imagined. I had experienced the phenomenon, and I remained somewhat skeptical about what it really was. Without those lines, I still traded my program aggressively, and was doing exceedingly well with it.

I had experienced a different way of analyzing price movement, and I had spent many thousands of dollars trying to replicate it on a computer. There was software, commercially available, as well as real time data feeds for all the markets I traded. I knew what I wanted, but other than that one time, in my head, I hadn't come close to duplicating it.

Mama had fixed up a giant nursery upstairs in the first bedroom I'd had when I moved there from the orphanage. It was a six crib affair, with two king size beds for the staff or the mom's to sleep in. Every weekend we were home, we'd find a way to bring a few of the children over there, for her and Gerta to fuss over.

In early May, Mama surprised all of us by selling off the golf learning center to a famous professional golfer who was buying up golf courses all over the country. She got a wonderful price for it, but, still, it surprised us that she would even consider selling it. At dinner a few evenings later, Joyce asked her why she had sold out.

"I didn't want to miss out on spending the summers with all the babies, Joyce. You know how busy it gets for me in the summers. I couldn't do both, so I made the only choice that made sense to me. Besides, seventy million was way too much to pay for what they were buying. At that price, they'll never make a decent return on their investment."

It turned out she was wrong about that, when a Japanese company came in, two years later, and paid them over a hundred and twenty million to buy out their position. In spite of that, I'm sure Mama always believed she'd gotten way the best of them when she sold out. They kept the name for the Academy, and that made it an even sweeter deal for Mama.

In the first summer we were home from college, Mama took over for Joyce in guiding our three new helpers. In no time, they were all licensed drivers, with used cars of their own. Hans and Gerta really got along well with Phil, Claire, and Thelma, and the five of them spent a lot of time with each other. Both houses were full with children and laughter all summer.

I played a lot of golf, mostly by myself, because Shirley couldn't swing a golf club with her belly so distended. All of us spent a lot of our time at the country club pool. It was remarked about too, by some of the other members. Some of the most vocal people were saying that our total group was far in excess of what should be allowed for any one family membership. When we'd gotten one or two restrained complaints made about this, I had Frank go to the membership committee, offering to buy us three additional memberships, to quiet the people making the complaints.

This offer was refused by the membership committee. Later, after Frank had reviewed Uncle Bunny's agreement with the country club, he found that, as part of the payment that had been negotiated, for all the changes Uncle Bunny had helped them with, the country club had waived any right to impose a limitation on the number of our family members, or to restrict the number of corporate users.

This was all part and parcel of the new corporate membership they had granted to him in lieu of a cash payment for his services to them. It specifically included our company, Uncle Bunny's law practice, and both our individual family's, the Chalmers and the Parsons. At the time it was negotiated, no one could have anticipated the growth our family was going to have.

Effectively, according to Frank, this meant we couldn't exceed our membership privileges. In fact, since he had assumed Uncle Bunny's practice, country club membership was available for him, and for his family as well. He wouldn't even bill me for his time spent on this, due to his family's pleasure at gaining free use of the country club facilities.

I didn't feel bad for the country club. Frank told me that we were spending over twenty thousand dollars per month at the club, all during the summer recess from school. We all liked to eat our lunches there, and we had a lot of guests who liked to eat there with us. It wasn't unusual for thirty five of us to all eat together in the smaller banquet room. The restaurant loved us, because we never complained, and we always tipped at least twenty percent, usually more than that.

It became a good place for us to meet with any people that we needed to see. Group home people, Bea and Aunt Clara, and even my Dad started taking occasional days off, to come sit by the pool, to hold meetings with us and some of his business associates. On those days, both Joyce, Mama, and I, were involved in those business discussions as well. Usually, Mama would be holding one or another of the babies. For some reason, she had taken a particular liking to holding Derek, or spending time with him in the shallow end of the pool. Derek was the oldest, and he could do more than either of the twins. He also had a great laugh.

Once, on a Spring weekend, before school let out, on the day of the twins first birthday party, we had fifty three people in attendance for the celebration. We let the club cater the party, in the pool area, including setting up a portable bar for the drinks, and we didn't hear a peep of complaint out of them. There weren't any complaints, not until our group started monopolizing the pool area, later in the summer.

There was an unused grassy area off to the side of the pool, so, right after the summer season was over, they poured some concrete there and widened the fenced off area, doing this to expand the number of lounge chairs, and to put in some long needed new tables with those large umbrellas, that were stuck through a hole in the center.