Page 30 of You'll Find Out

“Are you sure?” Mara asked, almost to herself, as she surveyed the barely touched breakfast. “You haven’t eaten much . . .”

Angie poked her head through the narrow opening of the screen door and hurried back into the kitchen. “I said I all done!” she reasserted.

“But you barely touched the pancakes.”

Angie puckered her lips in thought and then decided to ignore her mother. She took a swipe at her mouth with her napkin, as if, once and for all, to close the subject on breakfast, and then raced out the back door, leaving the half-eaten stack of pancakes to soak up the remainder of the syrup.

Mara didn’t feel up to battling with Angie so early in the morning after a restless night. Knowing that she was probably making a maternal error, she ignored Angie’s disobedience and ill manners and tried to still the throbbing near her temples. Her early morning headache seemed to be pounding more harshly against her skull.

“Would you like a cup of coffee?” Mara asked stiffly, seeing the worried expression in June’s eyes. Mara held the coffeepot in midair and avoided June’s direct gaze. Was it Mara’s imagination, or did June seem older and appear more troubled today than usual?

“I’ll get some later,” the older woman replied, and cast a furtive glance to the back porch. Angie was quiet, and June decided that the little girl was unlikely to interrupt, at least not during the next few minutes. She touched her neck hesitantly and nervously before she broke the silence that had been building between herself and her daughter-in-law.

“I saw Dena Saturday afternoon. She came and visited me,” June began, gauging Mara’s reaction.

“And how was she?” Mara asked, sipping her coffee and reaching for Angie’s dirty dishes.

“Concerned.”

Mara’s throat tightened convulsively, and she unconsciously bit at her lower lip as she deposited the dishes into the sink and turned on the water. “Concerned? About what?”

“You for one,” June replied, cautiously.

“Anything else?”

“The company.” June’s graying eyebrows drew together, and she hesitated for a moment, as if what she was about to say might be unpleasant. “She seems to think that you’re being bullheaded about selling Imagination Toys.”

Mara smiled grimly to herself as she placed the few dishes into the dishwasher. “I know that,” she admitted, drying her hands on a nearby cotton towel and turning to face her mother-in-law. “But you have to understand that I want the company to make it, and I think that it can. Selling now would be a mistake, I’m sure of it,” she stated, with more conviction than she actually felt. “Right now, with the company losing money, we couldn’t get a decent price for Imagination, even if we did want to sell. But if we could just turn the company around, to at the very least a breakeven point, the price we could ask would be substantially higher.”

June seemed to relax a little as she pulled her ivory knit sweater more closely over her thin shoulders. “Chilly in here, isn’t it?” she observed in a distracted voice, and then, as if suddenly remembering the train of the conversation, she snapped back to the subject at hand. “Well, Mara, I’m glad to hear that you’re not anxious to sell Imagination,” she offered. “I know it’s a big job, running an unprofitable business in the middle of a recession, and sometimes I worry that you’re working too hard, but the toy company is part of the Wilcox heritage. From my husband Curtis’s grandfather down to Angie . . .” Mara felt her heart stop at the mention of Angie’s link in Peter’s family. June hesitated only slightly. “I know that Dena would like to sell the company lock, stock, and barrel,” June stated through thinned lips.

After readjusting her sweater, the older woman sat down at the table and didn’t argue when Mara placed a cup of black coffee and the sugar bowl on the table within arm’s reach. After taking an experimental sip of the scalding brew, June smiled faintly and continued.

“It’s really not Dena’s fault, you know?”

“What isn’t?”

“Her attitude toward you.”

Mara tried to shrug off the insinuations, but June would have none of it.

“Don’t try to hide it from me, Mara. I know my own daughter, and I realize that she has never been fond of you . . . not since the beginning.” Mara drew in a steadying breath. The subject of the bitterness that existed between herself and Dena had never been brought out into the open. It was as if under the cover of Southern civility, the unacknowledged problem would somehow disappear. As close as Mara was to June, she never expected that June would ever admit she knew of the animosity that existed between Peter’s sister and his wife.

“She’s always felt a little inferior, you know,” June conceded, “and I suppose she has every right to feel that way. Curtis made no bones about the fact that he wanted a son to carry on the family business, and Curtis could never quite hide his disappointment that Dena wasn’t a boy. Not that he didn’t love her, you understand. But, well, it’s different between a father and daughter than it is with a son.” June smiled sadly into her coffee cup. When she lifted her faded blue eyes to meet Mara’s interested gaze, Mara noticed a genuine pain and empathy in the older woman’s eyes.

“I guess that I should have tried to patch things up between father and daughter, but I thought that as Dena grew up the situation might change. I should have known better, you know. Curtis and Dena were so much alike, from their red hair to their hot tempers! Anyway, when Peter came along, five years later, Curtis was delirious that he finally had his ‘son.’ Dena couldn’t help but feel left out, and slighted.” June sighed. “I realize that now, with women’s liberation and everything else, things have changed, and that today it’s not so important to have that first-born son. But then, Curtis never really accepted his daughter as anything but the second child, although she was his first. And even if she did have the temperament to manage the business, he would never have given her the chance!”

June seemed tired and weary. “You don’t have to explain all of this to me,” Mara whispered, touching the frail woman’s shoulder.

“Oh, but I do!” June responded viciously, and inadvertently spilled some of the coffee, sloshing it onto the saucer. “I know that Dena, well, she comes across a little catty sometimes, but I want you to know that it’s really not a personal vendetta against you.”

“I know that,” Mara admitted. “Don’t worry about it.”

“I can’t help it. She’s caused a lot of trouble for you in the past, but I think it’s because she’s felt left out. First from her father’s attention, and now from what she sees as her rightful inheritance. It didn’t help, you know, when Bruce broke off the engagement after learning that she wouldn’t inherit the bulk of Imagination Toys.”

Mara felt herself cringe as she remembered how upset Dena had been when her flaky lawyer fiancé had jilted her only months before the wedding had been planned.

“What do you think I should do about Dena?” Mara asked, feeling that June had recounted the painful memories with a purpose in mind.

---