A Father for Philip Read Online Free PDF

Robbins. She’d
wanted only to hire him as a manager, but he wanted to be his own boss. That
attitude pleased her and she agreed, knowing him to be hard-working and honest,
and she truly had no interest herself in maintaining a dairy farm. She had a
toddler to raise.
    Eleanor smiled, there in the dark rose
arbor, as she remembered when life had been so difficult and yet so simple.
    Needing something to do, she’d returned
to an old hobby—writing children’s stories. Only this time, she intended to
make it more than just a pastime. She wanted not only to occupy her mind but to
earn money apart from the rent Bill paid her. If she’d relied on her writing
income for her living, though, she and Philip would surely have starved. It was
the income from the rental of the farm, plus the fact that most of her
foodstuffs were free, that had kept them going. Unfortunately, no one seemed
interested in what she had to offer. They were good stories. This, Eleanor
knew, yet she had been unable to find the one editor, the one firm of
publishers out in the thousands available, who would see the value in her work.
Then came Grant Appleton.
    Grant... Short, fair-haired, stocky and
quick moving, a bulldog, a go-getter of a man, bought a seedy, rundown old
mote; and turned it, with great determination, into a prosperous resort hotel
by snapping up every available acre of land bordering it. With farming becoming
less and less profitable, many farmers found their grown children moving away
to make better lives for themselves and Grant cashed in on that trend. Marginal
lands could be removed from the Agricultural Land Reserve if a developer went
about it the right way, and Grant, apparently, did.
    Apart from the main hotel, he’d built
what he advertised as honeymoon-cabins built in secluded cut-outs along narrow,
winding roads through the wooded grounds, put in an artificial lake with a
waterfall and meandering canals through the place, a massive swimming pool, a
smaller one with waterslides, riding stables, trails, and an excellent
restaurant.
    This last was where Eleanor came in.
    Grant appeared at the farm one day when
the tenant farmer were out. He came, instead, to the cottage. He wanted a
steady source of fresh fruits and vegetables in season, plus top quality dairy
products, and someone had pointed him this way. Could they provide them? They
could, and did, and Grant returned again and again.
    Eleanor welcomed his friendly visits in
the evenings while her small son slept. She was, she had to admit, lonely, and
he did play a mean game of cribbage. Her tenant, Bill Robbins, had just married
at the time Grant came into her life, and she wanted to give him and his bride,
Kathy, the privacy she and David had cherished. Though they repeatedly offered
her and Philip meals and hospitality, Eleanor, more often than not, refused.
She remembered the time she’d had with David, remembered how short it had been,
and how much she had resented, in retrospect, having to share him.
    Grant, while she was tending to Philip
one evening, picked up a few of the printouts she’d been correcting, and began
reading. “I like this,” he said when she returned to the living room. Though
she considered his snooping an invasion of privacy, she forgave him when he
added, “It’s really quite good, Ellie. Who have you sent it to, if anyone?”
Eleanor explained her inability to interest anyone in her ideas and Grant said,
“Let me send it to my brother. He’s publisher and editor of a house that puts
out a limited number of books for schools... Not texts, but supplementary
readers.”
    And at last Eleanor had her break. Frank
Appleton, on Grant’s recommendation, had read her work, and Eleanor Bear, as
she called herself, was launched with a short adaptation of a British Columbia
First Nations legend, made suitable for and interesting to school children.
    The main difficulty in her friendship
with Grant, right from the outset, had been his inability to get