An Amish Gift Read Online Free Page A

than football, and far too polite to push a product on someone.
    Jennie had gotten pregnant with Tim only two months after their wedding, and any suggestion she made about getting a job herself was met with an instant refusal. There was no point, Shep insisted, because she needed to be at home with the baby. They were able to live on what he brought home for a few years, but the embarrassment of being the lowest producer in the showroom caught up with him. He changed companies, to get away from the disappointment in Leon Able’s eyes. The result was the same at the next place.
    At some point, he got the idea to sell insurance. He was fired up by the plan, convinced it was a product he would bemore comfortable selling. He tried with three companies. His successes, which Jennie always fussed over and celebrated, were few and far between. When she tried to suggest he find a job in something other than sales, he would explode that he wasn’t qualified to do anything at all, and he’d usually end up storming out of the house for several hours, getting as far away as he could from the argument and her pitying eyes.
    Jennie once made the mistake of urging him to take the time to go to college. The look on his face made her drop the subject at once. His decision not to go to college was a subject he never talked about. He could have gone to any number of schools on a football scholarship, but he had been unwilling to leave his younger brother, Michael. Shep had been responsible for his brother ever since their mother died, when he was ten and Mike eight. Their father wasn’t at home much, working the night shift as a waiter at a diner. He would leave for his shift at five in the afternoon and get back by five the next morning. That meant he would be asleep when the boys got up for school and gone by the time they got home from after-school sports practices. Mostly, the two boys were alone. Shep took care of their meals, their laundry, and everything else a parent would have done. It wasn’t that their father didn’t love them. Losing his wife had left him broken inside, and it was only the desire to take care of his children that gave him a reason to get up and go to work every day. Unfortunately, the best job he could come up with was the one that kept him away from them most of the time. Shep would sometimes see him in the stands at his football games, still in his waiter’s white shirtand black pants and shoes, looking tired but proud. When it came time to consider college, Shep wanted no part of leaving Michael home alone. He told Jennie that he was ready to marry her and get to work in the real world. College wasn’t important anyway, he said. If he had any resentment over the fact that Michael went to college, then on to law school and a lucrative career, he never showed it.
    Shep rarely showed his feelings on any subject to anyone but Jennie. They had met in high school; she had been shocked when the handsome eleventh-grade football star expressed an interest in her. He could have had almost any girl in the school at that point. She never could understand what he saw in her, the unpopular girl who was so quiet in classes. Later, she found out that he didn’t like the parties or the fuss girls made over him, or the kids who just wanted to say they were pals with the best football player their school had ever produced. Jennie, he knew, didn’t care. The two of them could sit and just be together. Plus, he was pleasantly surprised to discover she was far more outgoing away from school. “I always knew you weren’t the quiet type,” he’d said with a grin. “Don’t know how I knew, but I just did.”
    He also loved the way she made him laugh. But she hadn’t done that in a while, had she, she said to herself as she turned around to head home.
    Of course, once they started dating, he quickly learned why she was so withdrawn at school. She didn’t want to provide the other kids any more gossip about her than they