Hometown Legend Read Online Free Page A

or somehow misplace than show anybody.
    But I never got the chance to ask around whether some bold young coach was even interested in talking about the job. I guess
     you could say Rachel’s and my prayers, at least the ones for the football team, got answered.

5
    S o it’s a little less than a year ago now and I’m sitting in my office at the factory with two things on my mind. The first
     is sorta never off my mind and if you’ve ever been responsible for a business and more directly lots of people and their livelihoods,
     you know what that is. I’m not a neat-desk kind of a guy and even though I own the business the only luxury I got is Bev Raschke,
     the kid-loving assistant who answers my phone before I do. (She, of course, really runs the place, which is the joke I tell
     every day and which isn’t so funny or far off when you get down to it.) I don’t even have a nice office. I’ve only got one
     window and that looks out past Bev’s cubicle onto the floor.
    Anyway, I’m sitting there noodling how to keep the place alive and not lay off any more people while still trying to meet
     the business we do still have coming in.
    My chief financial officer thinks I ought to be spending more time schmoozing Chucky Charles, and she’s probably right cause
     Chucky’s told me he’s been getting courted by the competition. Well, I don’t know how we could be doing a better job for Dixie
     States, and anyway I think my workers need to see me looking out for them. I’m down to the really old and valuable veterans,
     some a which been with us longer than I have. But I’ve already got em overworked and underpaid and now I’m asking for overtime
     and they’re taking it cause they know if they don’t I’ll find someone who will. So that’s first and foremost, as old Benton
     Estes used to be fond of saying.
    Second, I’m thinking about the short drive north to see Rock Hill in their first playoff game. I’d like to see somebody give
     em a decent contest. We sure hadn’t. They’d shut us out for the third year in a row, cruising along toward their second straight
     state title, undefeated and not even outscored for one half in all that time. I hate em on principle. Maybe their snotty coach
     isn’t as bad as he seems, but he sure likes to gloat. He’s been around for twenty years and he’s got to be enjoying his revenge
     against so many losses to Athens City in his early days. They’re gonna play Beach, who might be able to give em a game; they’d
     beat us almost as bad as Rock Hill had, although that doesn’t always mean much.
    I had my eye on the assistant coach at Beach, who had to be looking for some other opportunity because the guy he was coaching
     under wasn’t much older than he was and didn’t look to be going anywhere soon himself. I couldn’t imagine a coach in a good
     program leaving for the thankless job I’ve got to offer, but stranger things have happened and some guys’ll do pretty much
     anything to get a head coach title on their resume.
    I probably wouldn’t have gone to the Rock Hill game if I hadn’t wanted to scout this assistant. Rachel couldn’t go cause of
     some deal at church and I didn’t really want to go alone. I sighed, looking at another request from some school group that
     wanted to tour the plant, wondering if the kids would wind up disappointed at how small the operation had become or whether
     they’d be at all fascinated by the process. I still was, but you kinda gotta be to stick with it as long as I had. We’d been
     putting off the tours until we had enough requests that we could group em and run em through all in one morning or afternoon.
     Bev and I were the only ones with the time to take em through, and I’d just recently dumped assisting the Human Resources
     department on her too.
    Bev was a handsome woman a couple years older than me who’d been with American Leather since she was in high school. She’d
     never married, but somehow we’d