Hometown Love Read Online Free PDF

haphazardly stacked a few rolls of tape on the shelf. “Gabe likes to help me push his brother,” she said confirming Jessie’s suspicions that he’d knocked into the display.
    “This thing gets knocked over at least once a week.” Jessie exaggerated a little. Actually, in the two months it’d been up, only one other person had knocked it over. “It’ll only take me a few minutes to fix it. You can finish your shopping.”  And head home before your son causes any more damage . Jessie watched as Gabe took off down the aisle, pushing the stroller as fast as he could, his baby brother laughing the whole time.
    “Thanks, Jessie.” Leaving the mess behind, Tina hurried after her sons.
    With a little shake of her head, Jessie finished putting the display back together and then continued on toward aisle six, her original destination. Earlier that morning, Phil Larson had called looking for ten more cases of slate tiles. She’d promised to check and get back to him. Although a simple task, this was the first time all day she’d had the opportunity to check.
    Once in aisle six, Jessie scanned the shelves looking for the right item code. After finding it, she counted the number of cases left. Perfect; they had three here and nine in the backroom, enough to give Phil what he needed and not wipe out their inventory. With one more thing crossed off her morning To-Do list, Jessie made her way back to her small office. As a child, she’d spent countless days in this same office with her grandfather as he managed the store. Now it was hers.
    In a way, she knew her grandfather would’ve loved to turn everything over to his only son. Unfortunately, her dad had never been interested in the store. All her life he’d driven tractor-trailers cross-country, sometimes spending a week or more away from North Salem. As a result, she’d been raised more or less by her grandparents, with her father stopping home between runs. These days, he was around more, but he still had no interest in the family business. Instead, he spent his days driving trailers for a New England-based grocery store, which at least allowed him to return home each night. That didn’t mean they saw each other all that much more. Not long after her father had given up cross-country driving and moved back into Blackthorne Farm, her grandparents home, she’d moved into her own apartment.
    For the most part, she tried not to resent her father’s decision to keep driving those long hauls after her birth. After all, he had only been twenty when she was born and his wife had died during childbirth. Then the woman he’d married two years later divorced him. Finding oneself as a single parent at that age would be rough on anyone. And her grandparents had given her the love of four parents, but still, it would’ve been nice if her father had been around more.
    As if thoughts of her grandfather had conjured him up, he appeared in the doorway. He still came in a few days a week, but it was more of a way for him to get out of the house than because the store needed him. As someone who had worked hard all his life, he found retirement difficult.
    “Sean’s out front looking for you, honey. If you’re busy, I can help him.”
    “I got it, Gramps. Thanks. But I saw Rex come in a little while ago.” Jessie came around from behind her desk. Rex often stopped in to enjoy the free coffee and talk with her grandfather. “I just made a fresh pot fifteen minutes ago and grabbed some of those crawlers you like from Peggy Sue’s. There were still some left when I checked.” After dropping a kiss on her grandfather’s cheek, she went to the front of the store where Sean stood talking to Brian, a high school student who worked there.
    “Sorry I never got here yesterday,” he said, after ending his other conversation. “I had dinner with Taylor and my father,” he explained, referring to his much younger half-sister.
    She noticed that when he mentioned his dad, Sean no