Chapter 35

"Hello, I'm Joyce Parsons, Kenny's wife. Welcome to our home." Joyce had her hand extended, and was shaking hands with Cindy Macklinson. If you didn't know Joyce really well, you would have thought she was calm and composed by the way she greeted our guest.

I stood up and walked towards the two of them, coming up behind Joyce and placing an arm around her shoulder, pulling her back against me. I could feel the pressure as she leaned her body back into me. The actions of her body giving lie to the words issuing forth from between her lips.

I didn't know what I could say to her to calm whatever fears Emily had provoked by her panicked phone call. I was upset at myself for the reaction I was having over meeting Cindy. What use did I have for another complication in my life?

"Cindy, I'm sorry for needing to leave you alone before, but it seems like Emily got all worried about something that she needn't have. Would you like to get started discussing the grain purchases, and learning about my trading program?" The whole time I spoke to her, I kept Joyce close against me. Partly, this was for her sake, to keep her calm, and, partly, for my sake, to keep me focussed on keeping things on a professional plane with Cindy. Seeing Joyce and Emily's reactions to things had finally registered and served to give me enough worry to cause me to pause and think about the danger my reaction posed to my family and myself.

"You said we could talk about what Emily told me, after all your other wives were here to tell their side of it. Aren't they all here yet?" Cindy looked innocently up at my face, ignoring Joyce's presence.

This was the first time it occurred to me that she might have been as affected by me, as I was, with her. I felt Joyce beginning to burrow further against my side.

I knew I was in the presence of real trouble now. It would have been complicated enough if it had only been me that felt a strong attraction to Cindy. If she felt the same kind of attraction for me, there would be no way to smooth things over without provoking further fireworks from the wives.

"I don't think that's a good idea now. Perhaps we should forget this whole idea. When we suggested doing this, we thought it would make it easier for your father and mine to get along as friendly allies, rather than being bitter competitors. We didn't know he would be sending you to discuss the grain contract, or my trading activities."

I could see Cindy's eyes widening, a look of both fear and dismay was on her face, immediately after I suggested forgetting the original purpose of her visit.

"You can't do that!" She practically shouted when she said it.

"Kenny, it isn't her fault." Joyce said that as she moved away from me, and walked over closer to Cindy.

"Joyce, you need to stay out of this. I think we'd all be better off if we just admitted this wasn't going to work. I think Emily made certain of that when she started discussing our personal business with Cindy. I don't feel comfortable with the way things are right now. None of us are comfortable."

"We can forget that other thing. It isn't important. I won't say anything to my family about it. Can we just get back to what is important? I came here to find out how you can sell us our grains so cheaply. My father needs to understand how you can do that."

The whole atmosphere had changed quickly when I said we should just forget the whole thing. It was like throwing cold water on two dogs knotted together. Whatever lust I'd been feeling had suddenly dissipated. From Cindy's statements and demeanor, the same thing had happened to her. Joyce had quickly gone from worrying about losing me, to worrying about how all of this was affecting Cindy. The three of us stood there, uncertain about what we should say next. I knew I wasn't going to be the next to speak.

"It won't hurt anything to tell her how you do the grain purchases, Kenny. Tell her that, and show her your trading program." Joyce was looking at me, and then she turned back to Cindy. "Kenny uses all the grain requirements from our companies, and some others that we provide grain for, as leverage against his futures trading results. He buys and sells, as long as the grains trade in a range inside this box he has.

"He gets out whenever his trades show a profit, and then he trades again. If they don't ever show a profit, he takes delivery against the grain delivery requirements he has with all the baking companies. That almost never happens though, because there is too much volatility in the markets.

"When it does happen, something else is out of whack, and Kenny starts trading it against his grain holdings. All he ever has to do is make more money from his trading than the cost of delivering the actual grain to our customers. All the rest is his profit."

Joyce was displaying a greater understanding of what I did than I would have given her credit for having. She was certainly describing the trading process a lot better than I would have been able to do. I could take issue with her description of my grain commitments as "leverage", but, other than that, I had to admit she had covered all of the essentials in describing what I did. I preferred to think of the grain commitments as reference levels, as the tops and bottoms of my trading boxes. As long as grain prices stayed inside my trading boxes, I could, and did, make money, from trading them.

"What do you use to fix the grain price absolutes, the Dollar?" Cindy looked at me while she asked the question. Right away, I understood that she had followed everything that Joyce had said, plus, she had the requisite underlying knowledge of trading beforehand, otherwise, there was no way she could have asked such a pinpoint question of me.

"Metals and the Dollar. I use foreign currencies too, if one of them seems too far out of line. I like the Swiss Franc and the Deutsch mark for that, but I use the British Pound sometimes, too."

"Do you use platinum also?"

"No. I use gold and silver, but only if the metals seem either too high or low to the currencies. I keep them all flowing on my computer screen, and I've attenuated each signal so that it shows a relationship with the grains and the other currencies or metals."

"Are you using a proprietary program to tweak your signals?" That question answered any remaining doubts I might have had about Cindy's expertise, or where it was derived from.

"Where do you normally work, Cindy?"

"I do some back office accounting for a commodity trading firm in Birmingham. I've been handling all of my Dad's grain purchases, from just after he and my mom split up. She used to do it for him before that."

I knew there was nothing I could do to hide the methods I used for my trading from her. Not if I continued explaining them to Cindy, from the point where Joyce had left off.

Once she saw how I had configured my trading console, she would know everything necessary for duplicating my system, and would be able to convert it over for her own use.

Even so, I was vain enough to believe that her trading results, using the whole of my system, would be inferior to my own. I believed this, but had nothing concrete to base the belief upon.

For all I really knew, she might be a better trader than I was. At the very least, by showing her my entire trading program, I'd be inviting unwanted competition. It could cost me a bunch of money.

"I'm satisfied that you already know enough, just from what you've been told so far, to be able to report back to your father that we can make deliveries at the prices we say. I'm not interested in giving you or your family any more of my trading program. I wouldn't care to have you using my methods to trade for yourselves."

"I think that's fair. I would like to see your set up though. I only buy for the company through institutional grain brokers. I don't trade in any grains. I have a small account of my own, but it's used strictly for forex trading."

I thought about what she was saying. There was a huge difference between trading grains and trading currencies. Forex trading was different from futures trading too. Just because she hadn't traded grains though, that didn't mean she couldn't learn to do so very quickly.

"I'll let you sit and watch me trading tomorrow, but I'm not going to tell you anything about my internal software programs, or about how I've managed to attenuate and integrate the price data for all the commodities and currencies I watch. If you want to try to fool around and set up your own system after seeing mine, you're welcome to do that, but I'm not going to help you with it."

"You needn't worry about me, or my Dad's company, Kenny. My personal account is less than twenty thousand dollars, and my Dad is having enough trouble just keeping what he already has together. We're having our own problems staying afloat. Even with the grain prices you've promised us, we might not be able to keep things going. I'm not supposed to talk to you about our problems, but I didn't want you thinking they sent me here to steal your secrets."

Joyce began asking her pointed questions about her father's business. Many of the questions were outside Cindy's knowledge. She explained that she wasn't very active in the family business, other than as a buyer of grains for the bakeries.

"Did the price war with Consolidated hurt your company that much?"

"My dad said it almost put us under. It still might, unless he can get new financing. Our bankers are worried about their collateral. They're trying to make us submit to an outside appraisal of our plant assets. If they succeed, my dad says they'll pull our operating line. He's put it off for as long as he can, but he hasn't been able to find anyone else to take over our banking needs. When he first made the bid on those Consolidated assets, it was mostly so he could go to the banks and try to set something up, based on the value of the new assets he would be acquiring. It didn't work, so he had to withdraw his bid."

"He should have raised his prices back up when Consolidated went under."

"He did, but he couldn't raise them all the way back up. There is still competition from the small, independent, bakeries. They were squeezed too, and they had to lower their prices to try to compete with us and Consolidated. They haven't gone all the way back up either. It isn't good for any of us, and that's one of the reasons my dad agreed to work something out with your company."

"How much is your current operating line?" When Joyce asked that, it surprised me. This wasn't the kind of information one competitor would give to another. That didn't seem to bother Cindy. I think she had already decided that our company was her father's only hope for staying afloat.

"We have a revolving one hundred thirty million dollar operating line. That would be more than enough, usually. My dad, and Uncle Larry decided to finance some long term purchases using our operating account. That was the first time the bank started questioning the underlying collateral for their loan. Having those new trucks and ovens put their collateral fears to rest, but it came at a big cost to our operating capital. Over fifty million is permanently tied up in equipment loans now. What's left, isn't enough for us to maintain current operations. Dad could refinance the new equipment, but then the collateral would be impaired again. With depreciation, the ovens and the trucks are worth less to the banks each quarter, and that's why they're making noises again."

"Are you operating profitably right now?" I figured I should ask her that right away. If they weren't currently showing an operating profit, no amount of assistance with their debt restructuring would help to close the gap. Without operating profits, debt wasn't their real problem.

"We're break even right now, but we'd be very profitable if we abandoned our marketing efforts in the bigger cities, especially if we bought our grains for four to five percent less than we now do. My dad wants to do that, but both my Uncles, Larry and Phil, are against it. They both say we need to grow bigger, in order to make room for my two brothers, and five other cousins in the business. They are both against the deal my father is trying to make with yours."

"If they're against it, then they must not understand what we're offering you. We don't want to compete in the smaller towns. Us being in the larger cities will make it harder for another national or regional competitor to come in and take you on. They'd have to go up against us too. We haven't had that kind of battle in a while."

"It's mostly my Uncle Larry. Uncle Phil always goes along with him, because he's the oldest. There are only five votes, and my dad has two of them. My Aunt Patricia, she votes with my Dad usually, but Larry's convinced her that this deal will leave us too small to support all the family members who work in the business. He thinks the bank will pull our credit if we down size, and try to stay in the smaller markets only."

"He might be right. The problem is, you don't really have any other choices. You don't have the financial resources to try to keep us out. Even if we decided to stay out of the region, others would move in and compete in the big cities. Your real strength lies in the smaller towns. There isn't enough there to make it profitable for someone else to go in and try to take market share away from you. I know you need to be profitable, but trying to compete in the large markets isn't going to work for you. Your father is right this time."

"It won't do him any good to be right if he can't convince my Aunt that he is. She's also starting to worry about what happens if the business goes under. The family has everything we own tied up in the business. What will be left if the bank forecloses on the operating line? Nothing."

I didn't have any easy answers for her. I was just grateful that our switching the discussion to business had helped take our minds off of our attraction to each other. When Joyce suggested that Cindy go with her to meet the rest of our family, I was relieved. I told Joyce I needed to finish working on a few things first, but that I'd join all of them later, in the living room.

I hid in my office as long as I could, knowing that I was going to have to face all of them whenever I did decide to come out again. I had wasted most of a trading day, accomplishing very little.

When I went back over my trade confirmations though, I noticed a lot of automatic trades had been processed by the program.

The grain prices had been rising for the past two weeks, and I had been making money selling into gains, and buying back on the dips. I was hedged with the Swiss Franc and the U.S. Dollar on the upside, and with both of the metals down on the low end.

It had turned out to be a good day to let the automatic trading program operate alone. There was good money to be made in skimming profits off of aimless volatility. I had earned quick trading profits repeatedly, but the overall rise in grain prices meant that all the baking operators were going to soon be paying more for their grains.

Seeing this, I started playing with an idea I'd had for insuring the bakers against just this kind of a temporary market condition. It involved me selling into the forward contract months while they were carrying a lesser timer premium due to fears that the current grain prices couldn't be sustained.

When storage costs and time costs were factored in, spot was selling at a premium to current month and future months. I knew there was a way to capitalize on this situation. No one thought grain prices would continue to rise. The futures market was already factoring in a price drop across the board in the grains.

At six o'clock, Joyce came into my office to tell me that dinner was ready. I'd been so involved in my new idea, I'd completely lost track of time. I had made some progress with this idea, enough so I knew now that I could offer all our allied bakers short term grain at a slight discount from current spot prices.

They would be able to save about four percent over current spot prices, but only if they committed to paying the difference between spot and my delivery costs if the market continued its price move upward.

If they agreed to do this, they could avoid the necessity of having to raise prices to their own customers, while still maintaining their normal profit margins.

Later, at the very worst, they would be paying the same price as their competitors, spot plus delivery charges. I knew I could keep my trading losses well within the margin I'd left myself.

To a baker, a sudden steep rise in the cost of his raw materials could put him under quickly. My new proposition would smooth out any temporary price fluctuations, and, incidentally, allow me to box and bracket the grains in a way that made it possible for me to trade larger quantities of grains for longer periods of time.

I had already decided that I'd try to hold my future grain delivery prices as close to spot as possible. I believed that the additional trading profits would make this, at the very least, a neutral decision, on my overall trading profitability.

By the time I got to the dinner table, everyone else was already seated. I noticed funny looks coming my way from both Brenda and Shirley. I tried to smile, and act like I normally would. I didn't want to give anyone the impression that I shared any of Emily's fears concerning Cindy and me.

When I looked over at Cindy, she blushed and wouldn't meet my eye. I looked around me, and all of the wives were watching Cindy and me.

"You are all making both of us self conscious with your staring, ladies. Emily, did you get everything straightened out with Joyce?" Emily blushed too. I'm sure she wasn't expecting me to single her out as being the one responsible for all the furor we'd had that day.

Maybe she thought I'd continue to be defensive about everything. I was worried about the reaction I'd had with Cindy, but I didn't feel guilty about it. I hadn't acted on anything.

I didn't accept any responsibility for getting everyone all worked up about nothing either. That was all Emily. By not confronting her, I'd be admitting that her fears had substance.

Attraction wasn't something that was controllable. Actions were, and I hadn't taken any actions towards Cindy. Emily had reacted as though she had caught the two of us in bed together.

"Kenny, you shouldn't be mad at Emily." Joyce looked uncomfortable about what I'd said. She never liked it when any of us were at odds with each other.

"Why not? She caused this whole thing. She embarrassed all of us, and she made you and I lose half a day at our work. All for no good reason. She shouldn't have said what she did to Cindy, to me, or to you, when she called you at work. She jumped to some pretty wild conclusions, but worse than that, she talked about our private business to a stranger. I'm sorry, Cindy. We don't usually fight like this, but today was very stressful for some of us." Emily got up when I said that last part to Cindy, and ran from the dining room.

Of course, Brenda and Joyce ran right after her, leaving Shirley, Cindy and me, alone at the table, just as Phil and Thelma started bringing the food out to us. I got up and served myself from the serving plates and bowls being brought out.

It was some kind of white fish cooked in a creamy white sauce. There were green things floating around in the sauce, some type of flavoring. I think it was orange roughey, but it didn't really matter to me. I had lost my appetite for food because of the turmoil we'd been having. I was only eating because I didn't want to give anyone the satisfaction of keeping me away from my own dinner table.

Cindy and Shirley sat there, silently, watching me eat my food. I didn't speak, and they didn't either. As soon as my plate had been emptied of food, I stood up, excusing myself, leaving to go back to my office again.

It was after ten o'clock before Joyce came back to get me.

"I took Cindy over to Mama's house. She was too uncomfortable to want to spend the night here. She's talking about flying back to Alabama in the morning. What you said to Emily tonight was terrible. She cried herself to sleep because of it. I was ashamed of you tonight."

"Really? I'm sorry you feel like that. I'm not ashamed of myself at all. If I hadn't said anything to her, she wouldn't have understood how unhappy I am with her actions today. She overreacted. She knows it too, but worse than that, she told Cindy all those things about us, for no good reason that I can see. Why did she do that?"

"I don't know why. I do know it wasn't to embarrass you. Did you ever stop to think what it must look like for someone who doesn't know about all of us? All those babies, and all of them yours? We aren't a normal family, Kenny. We take some explaining to people. Emily wanted Cindy to know that we were all together, in a loving way, that we loved each other, and were a family too. The other thing, later, that was because she saw how you two looked at each other. It scared her. We all love you, Kenny. We know you love us, but, we also know you could find someone you loved even more, at any time."

"This wasn't a social thing, Joyce. This was business. She came here to see about my trading, and to try to find out how I could deliver the grain at the prices I quoted them. I blame Cindy too. She was the one who kept asking Emily questions about it. It should have all been just like it was later in my office, when the three of us were in there talking about business. None of this other stuff should have happened."

"Maybe not. That doesn't change what did happen. What are we going to do about that? Emily has a hard time dealing with you criticising her like you did, in front of all of us. You need to apologize to her."

"What about Cindy? What about our deal with Macklinson's? We don't even know yet what all the fall out will be because of what Emily started today. I'm sorry she's so upset, and I still love her, but I'm not the one who needs to apologize."

"When you act like this, its like you're saying that Emily's feelings aren't as important to you as some business deal is. I saw you with Cindy, when she first came back to the room, Kenny. I'd have to say that Emily was right to be so worried about what might happen. I was scared too. You didn't see yourself when you looked at her. Emily and I both recognized that look. We understand what it could mean. We also saw how she looked at you."