The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap (16 page)

JACK [
giving up
]:
Yes, lovely. Green hills, rolling landscapes, the coastline is—

PERSON:
Wow, cool! Got any books on turtles?

JACK [
to Wendy
]:
Do we have books on turtles?

WENDY:
We have books on everything! [a blatant lie; at the time we had about sixteen thousand books] Do you mean fiction, facts on them in the wild, or the Christian children’s book Janette Oke wrote about turtles?

PERSON [
eyes glazing
]:
Uh, my daughter got a turtle for her birthday. It lives in a tank in her bedroom.

WENDY [
pointing to nonfiction
]:
We have a couple of books on aquatic animal care. Let me show you.

PERSON:
Wow, great. We got her the turtle after her mom took off. We thought it would help her cope, you know, give her something to look after.

This kind of information leakage happens all the time. Sometimes it’s funny; sometimes it’s not. Customers tell us about fights with cancer, nasty exes, beautiful grandchildren, despicable bosses, coping with life’s big moments, stupid relatives, stupid relatives, stupid relatives, and how they intend to marry or kill so and so. People need to talk. We’re the bartenders to whom everyone tells their troubles in this intellectual pub. Let them talk. Perhaps it makes the world a better place. At worst, it gets things out of their systems.

As it stands, when people reveal any form of neediness in the shop, they’re stuck with our more or less benevolent ineptitude. Jack and I have different gifts regarding customers. I’ve got a great memory for faces, so I greet people by name. Jack is crap at remembering names, let alone faces, so he just smiles at everyone and asks, “Been in before?” in that gorgeous Scots burr. Guess which one they like better? Sigh. We ask customers if they want coffee or tea, point out the shortbread, and leave them alone until they start asking questions.

About four months after we opened, a woman we’d never seen before came in searching for a handful of fairly eclectic titles:
Communion
by Whitley Strieber, an out-of-print book called
Small Holdings,
an Ann Rule true crime paperback, and several classics. I stacked these on the table and left her to peruse. By turns quiet and garrulous, she talked over me as I started to answer her questions, ignoring my answers. Truth be told, she seemed … odd.

The woman sat down to assess her gathered armful, ignoring our offers of tea and queries as to whether she had enough light.

“Do you have
The Tao of Pooh
?” she snapped.

Miffed at her tone, I fetched it. As I handed it over, tears pooled in her eyes.

Jack looked at me. “I’ll put the kettle on.”

“Um, everything okay?” I asked, offering a tissue.

She scrubbed her eyes. “I lost these books. I’m replacing them.”

“Sure, lost,” I said, clueless.

She looked up at me; it was almost a glare. “Do I want to tell you this?” she asked, as if no one else were in the room. “Okay, but you asked for it. My house burned down. I lost everything. My dogs, three of them, burned. Everything burned. I’m replacing the books I lost.” She looked back down at her stack.

Eeep.
I sat down at the table and toyed with the sugar-bowl lid. “Well,” I said, “that sucks.”

The woman gave a half smile. “Yeah. It does.”

When she’d made her final selections, we gave her
The Tao of Pooh
free of charge. “Everyone needs a little help rebuilding.”

“I didn’t tell you the story so you’d give me a discount,” she barked. Jack rolled his eyes and disappeared into his man-cave. Beulah’s not the only one with boltholes.

“No, we know that,” I said, dropping the books into a bag. “Everybody deserves a break now and then. Look after yourself.”

She didn’t leave. Instead I made some more tea and we sat in the shop for two hours while she told the story—a horrific story, so you don’t need to know it. Suffice it to say, she lanced the wound that day, letting out pent-up poison.

And that was that, we thought. We’d given a woman coping with serious trauma a book. But she became the first of many. Due to the rural nature of the mountain bowl surrounding us, fires are a regular hazard. Even though we have a county—nay, region—full of the best volunteer firefighters in the world, if something up on the mountain starts burning, it’s going to finish before anybody can get up one of those narrow switch-backed roads to save it. At least once a quarter, someone comes into our shop seeking replacements for titles lost in a fire.

Did you know that one of the first things a fire victim replaces is their favorite book from childhood? We didn’t until a man asked for Syd Hoff’s
Danny and the Dinosaur,
and Jack said something about children loving that classic.

“For me,” the man said, without a trace of emotion. “Lost it when my house burned. Had it since I was a boy. Want another one.”

A man told us about his teacher reading the class
Beautiful Joe.
A woman described climbing her grandparents’ apple tree to devour
Heidi
; another had grown up pretending to be Sara Crewe in
A Little Princess,
waiting for her father to find her. Then they described the fires in which they lost each book—and a whole lot more.

We give fire victims one of their chosen books for free. There isn’t much else anyone can do. And I’ve found the outer edges of my inner strength. Ye gods and little fishhooks, fire stories have horrors that humans shouldn’t hear, let alone live. But they keep coming, so we keep putting the kettle on. Another lesson for bookshop owners: “Learn how to listen yet let it pass through you.” Thanks to some therapist friends, I have finally acquired that tough skill. But it wasn’t part of our anticipated job description.

The fire victims’ sad recountings were hard to listen to, although loss and pain should be respected. But with the professional shoppers, we reached the limits of our patience. Professional shoppers are akin to guerrilla bargainers, but rather than the people who hold the garage sales (like the Nancy Drew Lady) they are the hagglers and bargain hunters who frequent them—like Fiona and me.

As word got out about our trade-in policy, professional shoppers who frequented yard sales started bringing in books, intending to sell them for a profit. Since I had bought quite a lot of our opening inventory at such events, I knew by now what worked and what didn’t. Plus I could recognize the signs of items bought on the cheap, including masking-tape damage. Usually people understood if we said a book didn’t suit our shop, and we rarely refused books unless they were just too old or too damaged. But as the years passed and we gathered quite the collection of Cornwalls, Grishams, and Silhouette or Harlequin romances, we stopped taking some of the most common titles and authors. That’s when we found out the word “no” didn’t appear in everyone’s vocabulary.

A young man we’ll call “Jim” fell in love with an out-of-print book culled from our personal collection, brought over from Britain. He asked us to set it aside for him. Back in the early days of the shop we had no restrictions on our trade policy; you brought us books, a dollar amount got written into the ledger under your name, and you could spend it cross-genre on whatever you wanted. This was a mistake we corrected after Jim.

Jim began bringing us romances bought for ten cents at sales, price stickers still on them. At that time we stuck to our policy and accepted them in trade at twenty-five cents credit value, then later wound up selling them for three for a dollar. Not good math. (Have I mentioned before that we didn’t know what we were doing when we started?)

The book Jim wanted cost fifty dollars. You guessed it; he brought us two hundred romances over two weeks. We gave him the out-of-print, British-publisher-only antique volume and he walked out happy while we crammed two hundred Harlequins from the 1980s and 1990s onto a shelf.

Not only had we given away a valuable book, we’d created a monster. He kept bringing books scavenged in yard sales, picked up in thrift stores, even—as he bragged to someone else who told us later—found in the trash. Some of those little paperbacks were in dire condition, and we began to refuse a few of the worst. The pile of paperbacks we told him he couldn’t receive credit for grew with each successive visit. Finally we gave up on the “this is the last time” speech and just point-blank explained that we could not accept the stuff he’d brought.

To our surprise Jim politely but firmly told us these latest trades were just like what he’d been bringing for weeks, that he expected the same treatment he’d been receiving to date, and that we’d better not mess with him because he knew people.

Book mobsters? In the Gap? Who knew?

To be fair to Jim, there was a lot going on in his life. To be fair to ourselves, we didn’t want to be part of it. He continued his slow smolder and we continued stonewalling until he finally stopped bringing in trades. I can’t say that we were sorry.

It’s not that professional garage salers are a bad lot on the whole—we like Fiona just fine and she never annoyed anyone, weaving her magic on various lawns. But some people will consider a used book store tantamount to their personal cash cow. A small handful of customers have proven resolute about not spending money with us, and likely wouldn’t see this as detrimental to the fact that they enjoy having the store in town in the first place. It’s like people who cruise new book stores for titles, then go home and buy them off Amazon. They want the cheapest price they can get, and don’t see the effects their buying habits have on local stores—or why that should matter to them.

The No Cash Crew, as Jack calls them, haul in copious amounts of books for trade credit, but when the credit runs out won’t pay cash for anything. We keep an eye on what they bring, and once explained to a customer that we knew her books had come from the library’s castoffs trolley for fifty cents, so couldn’t credit them at half the retail price of twelve dollars as she was asking, although we still liked her and found her a worthwhile person. Losing a few pro bargainers over the years has not hurt us. We try to be nice, but some people define nice only as your doing what they want.

Again, exceptions abound. Barbara, one of our earliest customers, was a professional garage saler, but asked us straight-out what we wanted, then brought us Westerns, older science fiction, and certain children’s authors based on a list of “can’t keep ’em in stock” titles we gave her. Barbara proved a pleasure to work with. We called her “our outsource buyer.” And about four years into the relationship, she gave us a sweet smile and announced her plan to open a used book store forty miles away. We wished her well and offered her some overstock. When we’re down that way, we pop in on our “godchild,” and Barbara still comes to see us when she’s in the area.

Barbara works a day job as a prison guard, and remains one of the few people we met who already knew the role that bookshops play in the lives of families with incarcerated members. The first time a woman appeared in Tales of the Lonesome Pine clutching titles she’d purchased elsewhere, asking if we would mail them to her inmate son, we were so perplexed that she had to explain what she wanted twice, slowly. Until that moment, we had no idea that prisons don’t allow inmates paperbacks unless they’re mailed from a bookstore. (And they can’t have hardbacks.)

We do now. Once a package came from a prison with a form letter stating the books we had sent couldn’t be given to the requested inmate, having been deemed inappropriate by the warden. Inside lay two titles we’d never seen before, both new, both on U.S. army intelligence interrogation techniques. To this day, we have no idea who mailed them.

A jolly man of about six foot five comes in quarterly, bearing sudoku puzzle books. He gives us postage money plus “a little extra,” as he puts it, to mail them to his incarcerated brother. After a few visits we told him we didn’t need the tip if he would just cover the postage.

He smiled. “That’s nice of you, but I don’t want you to get sick of me askin’.”

Jack waved his hand in a “pshaw, neighbor” kind of way. “It’s okay, really. How long does your brother have left on his sentence?”

“Forty years.” The man grinned and put a fiver on the counter. “See y’all next time.”

Perhaps most proprietors opened with a more fulsome awareness of what hidden tasks lurk behind a bookshop’s doors. Jack and I didn’t have a clue—just desire, which with the naive sincerity of high school sweethearts we figured would cover everything. Doesn’t love conquer all?

I’ll be honest with you; it helps, but working sunup to sundown factors in as well. That “follow your bliss” saying actually has an undercurrent; if you follow your bliss, you’ll work hard to get it right. When the occasional customer tells us his or her dream of running a bookstore someday, we recognize our own naïveté in that enthusiasm. They may have some inkling about long hours and low pay, but rarely do they know about the fires, the guerrilla bargainers, the bereavements, or the prisons. Neither did we—then. But we sure do now. In all honesty, the scariest, hardest, saddest, most important stories found in a bookshop aren’t in the books; they’re in the customers.

C
HAPTER 14

Yarn Goddesses

Methinks it is a token of healthy and gentle characteristics, when women of high thoughts and accomplishments love to sew; especially as they are never more at home with their own hearts than while so occupied.

—Nathaniel Hawthorne,
The Marble Faun

B
ARBARA AND FIONA WEREN
’
T THE
only regulars who helped shape the bookstore’s stock and personality. A few months after we opened, Isabel (she of the curling toes) ended her long reign as director of a preschool and donated all her children’s books and shelving to us. We still sometimes call the children’s area “Isabel’s Den.”

Although Isabel is a charming and fun person in and of herself, many people keep on her good side because of her years directing the preschool. Sometimes at a Tuesday night needlework session, as seven or eight women sit about the table knitting or crocheting, the
Post
will be lying open to a photo of—for instance—a former Big Stone Gapper, now a famous cardiovascular surgeon living in New York City, winning some national research award at the American Medical Association’s annual meeting. Isabel will glance at the photo and say, “Oh, I remember little Jimmy! He used to pick his nose and eat it. A doctor now? My goodness.”