Chapter 24

As I had expected, I had difficulty going to sleep Monday night. At one in the morning, I heard Grace and Jane coming up the stairs. They certainly weren't taking any pains to be quiet. The two of them came right into my room, without even knocking. I closed my eyes and pretended to be sleeping.

"Kenny! Wake up!" This was Grace screaming out her drunken whisper.

"I already am awake. Why are you two coming into my room like this?"

"We needed to ask you something." This was from Jane. Both of them broke out into a giggling fit then. I felt movement at the foot of my bed, and when I looked up from my covers, they were both crawling towards me. Jane was on the inside, while Grace was outside. Jane brought her face up, close to my ear. "Grace and I, we both want you to do it to me." Again they were laughing and giggling after Jane spoke.

"Go to your room, both of you. It's after one, and you've been drinking."

"You think we didn't know we've been drinking? We're not that drunk. We know what we're doing. You have to help us, we both agreed that you were the right one."

"Jane, I don't want to do it with you, and I'm reasonably sure this wasn't your idea either." Jane started climbing on me then, not stopping until she was straddling me. I was a lot bigger than she was, but she was very athletic, and strong too. I wasn't resisting her, but I had been surprised when she did that.

"Listen. Remember the big fight Grace and I had? It was about my brother, Jimmy. Grace screwed him a lot more than she needed to, or was supposed to. She cheated on me, with my own brother."

"You knew I was going to, Jane. We even talked about it."

"I knew you'd do it once or twice, Grace, not two or three times a day, everyday, for a month."

"Jane, what does that have to do with me? I thought you two had worked it out anyway?"

"She won't let it go, Kenny. She keeps thinking I did it because I liked him or something. I just like sex, not Jimmy. I love you, Jane. Sex is sex, but love is different."

"I'm not changing my mind, Grace, we agreed. I'm going to do it with Kenny, and you have to watch him doing it to me."

"Get out of my room, both of you! I really hate it when you treat me like this. I don't like it when you're kidding, but when you're serious, it's even more insulting. I treat you both like friends, but you treat me like I'm a convenience for you, like toilet paper. This is making me very mad."

"Why should you be mad? How many times have we caught you looking at my tits, Kenny? A hundred times? Two hundred? All we're asking is one little favor. Grace needs to learn how it feels knowing someone you love is having sex with someone else."

"I already know that, Jane. You need to find out that if you love someone, unimportant shit like that doesn't matter. You're jealous of your own brother, the one you handed me to on a silver platter, so that we could stay together when you moved."

"Good. If it doesn't matter, me fucking Kenny shouldn't bother you. When I suck his cock, you won't be worried that I might like it more than I like going down on you."

I got up out of bed and went over to my door, and turned on my lights. I opened up my bedroom door. "If you two aren't out of my room in thirty seconds, I'm waking up Mama, and getting both of you thrown out of here permanently. If you ever try something like this again, you can kiss those camp counseling jobs goodbye." When I spoke about their golf counseling jobs, I think it finally got through to them. It was funny that they hadn't thought about the fact that I might not want to cooperate with them. They both scrambled up from my bed and started to leave the room. Jane hung back until Grace left the room, then she apologized to me. She was embarrassed and crying. I had gotten to know both of them pretty well, and I was certain that Jane only liked girls for sex. Grace was different, and she was open to more variety than Jane was. There had been times when I felt like Grace would have been willing to be unfaithful to Jane with both sexes. Jane's only lapse had been the day she first met Brenda. I started wondering whether Grace would be so unconcerned if Jane were to spend the night with Brenda instead of me. I shut and bolted the door behind them.

Somehow, I managed to get to sleep. I woke up at six ten in the morning, feeling tired and cranky. I barely had enough time to get a quick shower, get dressed, and run into the kitchen for a big glass of milk and two dough nuts, before Dad came in and asked if I was ready. We got in his car and headed out by six forty five.

"I'm glad you introduced me to Ron, Kenny, I think he's going to be a real asset for our expansion plans. I didn't tell your mother this, but I was looking for someone as a back up in case Rob Lucas gets upset if I decide not to retain Virginia. This problem between Jim Tanner and us isn't going to sit well with him either."

"Uncle Bunny said you planned it this way from the start." Dad looked over at me when I said that.

"I wouldn't exactly say I planned it that way. I knew it might come to that, but I went there hoping we could all sit down and work something out. I had no idea about Craig, and I underestimated how prepared David was to strike out on his own. Sometimes, Bunny sees sinister intent where none was present. Bunny is sharp though, and you'd be well advised to learn things from him. We've been friends for thirty years now, and I'm still learning from him."

"What's it mean when someone says 'bump and tickle'?"

"It means you've been conversing with Bunny. The correct phrase is 'slap and tickle'. This is British slang for having sex. Bunny always gets it wrong. He confuses it with 'bumping bellies' which is another slang term for having sex."

"So, if Uncle Bunny said it, he meant having sex? He was telling me yesterday, when I was worried that you and Mama were fighting over David and Craig having a company, that you were going to give in to Mama, and that you'd play bump and tickle to seal the deal. He knew you'd let Mama have her way, he said you'd probably planned it that way."

"Bunny is a corrupting influence on you, Kenny. That doesn't mean he doesn't know whereof he speaks though. He was correct for much of that. I would change him saying I planned it though, to something like, I was allowing for the possibility. Bertie, Bunny, and I, we all spend a lot of our time and energy, trying to anticipate what the others are planning or doing. Knowing each other's tendencies as well as we do, we are seldom taken completely by surprise. Take you, as an example of this, Kenny. Bunny picked you, not just because he knew Bertie wanted and needed a child. He picked you because he thought I might grow fond of you as well. He knew my weakness for intelligence, and for creative problem solving abilities. He picked you specifically, because he knew you possessed both, in extraordinary measure. He hoped it would result in the two of us creating a connection with each other."

"Uncle Bunny is pretty shrewd. He likes me a lot too though, do you think he also planned on that?"

"Not in the beginning, but Bunny has always been a softy. Of the three of us, Bunny is the most susceptible to his feelings. We've been exploiting this for years, your mother and I."

"What are you planning for today at work?"

"I need to call up Rob Lucas and let him know what transpired in Chicago with the Tanners. I need to make sure our plans are on track for the new scheduling for the route drivers. I have to think about how I want to position the new vending machine company. I'm having an hour long meeting with the department managers today, and each one is supposed to have handed out copies of their presentation to all the other attendees by yesterday. We'll be able to see if this idea of yours helps any. I got copies of all of the presentations on my desk before three P.M, which was the deadline I set. Any other advice for me?"

"Set an alarm when the meeting begins. Have it ring as soon as the hour is up. Put the clock right in front of you so all of them can see the time left. When the alarm sounds, get up and leave the room. They need to learn that they only have a limited time to present their ideas and get input at the meeting. If someone runs over his allotted time, stop him, don't let him finish on someone else's time."

"You must have a lot of German blood, Kenny. You have an efficiency fetish."

"You asked me. Part of what you were complaining about was that these overruns at the meetings were keeping you from doing all the things you needed to get done. It also was wasting the time of the people who were sitting around, waiting for you to get done with your last meeting, so that you could meet with them like you had scheduled. By allowing people to make you late, you're rewarding the abusers, and penalizing the victims of that abuse, including yourself in the list of victims. That isn't good management style."

"You don't discuss these things with your mother or Bunny, do you?" Dad looked worried. I remembered what Uncle Bunny told me about Dad being more concerned with his image than most other people.

"No, I only talk about this with you. Was I supposed to tell them these things?"

"Oh, no, this way is much better. By the way, your mother has a very keen sense of smell. It might not be a good idea to parade girls by her, after the two of you have been intimate."

"Do you mean Shirley? She and I didn't do anything more than kiss, and a little bit of touching above the waist."

"Really? Your mother was certain she smelled a lot more than simple touching on the two of you."

"I smelled it too, but that's all it was. Shirley hasn't ever done anything before. Last night was her first French kiss."

"I'll let your mother know that. She'll be so relieved to hear it."

"I don't think so. I get the feeling that Mama wants me to be more like Uncle Bunny was when he was young. She kind of encourages me that way."

"If that's true, you're very lucky. If I'd had your advantages while growing up, I'd have really exploited them."

"I can call Mother Superior, to find out if they have an opening for you." Dad laughed, he thought that was a good one. We both knew what advantages he'd been referring to.

When we got to work, I went off on my own. I was looking for some of the people who answered the phone, and took new orders from our customers. Instead of finding a big group of people, I found Edith and her daughter, Ellen. They answered the company phones and took all of the incoming orders. Edith was divorced, about forty years old, with dyed hair that was supposed to look red, but had turned out kind of pink. Ellen was sixteen, but she looked about twelve. She had dropped out of school in the tenth grade, but she was so smart, it intimidated me. Her verbal skills were simply off the charts. I listened to her talking to people for less than fifteen minutes, before I knew she was going to be the brains behind our new ordering system. I was talking to Edith, when I found out that Ellen wasn't even an employee of ours. Edith brought Ellen to work because she no longer had a driver's license herself. Edith liked to drink and drive, and the State of Kansas took a real dim view of that, at least they did, after the fourth or fifth time you were caught, and convicted of doing it. Our company benefited greatly from Edith's tendency to overindulge.

To relieve her boredom, Ellen started fielding the incoming order calls, and writing them up for her mother. This was during a period of time when there were supposed to be three people there answering phone calls. Two of them had quit, but no one thought to replace them, because all the customer orders were being turned in on time each day. Not only was there no defined order system in place, there weren't even order pads for Ellen, or anyone else to use. She would write down the customer address info, and then using her own style of shorthand, write down their order. Later, when it had slowed down, she'd write it up in plain English for the order pullers. Cut off time for next day deliveries was one thirty in the afternoon. One thing Ellen did have was a list of all of the products we had for sale, and their current prices. She had to go over to a different part of the building to pick this up every morning, when she and her mother first came to work. I knew, as I started finding these things out, that my Dad was going to be furious when he found out how slipshod this ordering system was. I left at nine thirty, with Ellen and Edith both busy writing up orders. I found the girl that Ellen told me was the one who gave her the product and price information every morning, and she and I worked out an order form system. Including different sizes, we had ninety four different product codes that we currently were producing and selling. This didn't count all the products from the other companies that weren't yet integrated into our distribution line.

By three o'clock, I had a master copy of an order list ready to go out to our printers. I started off with a run of fifty pads of fifty order sheets to a pad, including an original and a duplicate. I went to Dad's secretary to get some money from petty cash for printing costs. I'd called a printer close by, and he quoted me sixty eight dollars for a run of this size. I thought it sounded pretty reasonable. I went and got Ellen, and had her drive us over to the printer. When she saw the master order form, she was thrilled. When I told her that we were going to put her on the payroll, she was even more thrilled. The only part she objected to was when I told her that she would be in a different room than she had now, and that she wouldn't be with her mother.

"That won't work then. I need to be with Mom. She gets nervous if I'm not right there where she can see me. My sister, Bernice, she killed herself two years ago. Mom hasn't stopped worrying about me since then. I can leave her for an hour, maybe two, but after that, unless she's juiced, she gets frantic."