The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap (6 page)

Then we sat back and waited. Tracy had been right. About a dozen people showed up with stuff; what they pulled from the bowels of their (fortuitously dry) basements proved astonishing. Jack started a ledger recording each person’s precredit against opening day, and we spent evenings—lots and lots of evenings—shelving the loot.

A clergyman turned in a puberty-length collection of bikini-clad outer space bimbo paperbacks. He didn’t want trade credit. “Just get rid of these painful reminders of high school for me,” he said. They sold for an astronomical amount within a month of our opening. I called him back, but he reiterated they were a gift to get us started, so long as his name never got linked to them. He’s dead now, God rest his adolescent soul.

Barbara, a book enthusiast who already made a hobby of trading and selling on the Net, brought her stash of mostly Christian fiction, and we hit instant rapport. She offered to take a list of titles and genres we wanted and scour yard sales on our behalf, a task I was only too grateful to hand over to her. Glenn, the happy-go-lucky white-haired actor in local stage productions, appeared with true crime, seeking classics. Mr. Pettry, who was to become one of our regulars, hauled in about two hundred hardback thrillers, all in excellent condition, and proffered a list of others his wife Sylvia wanted.

Garth, town council member, donated how-to tomes on electricity, deck-building, and other manly pursuits. Like the pastor, he had an alternate agenda: “to see the floor of my garage again, just once, before I die.” In fact, most people bringing books were donors rather than swappers; they were cleaning house, or just chuffed that a bookstore had come to town and wanted to help it along. Few of that initial ragtag bag team took swap credit.

At the same time, Jack and I got one of our first lessons in how quickly a used book store can become a junk shop. We didn’t want to say no to any of these nice people, but what could be done with a six-year collection of
National Geographic
magazines, a selection of 1970s economic textbooks, and yet more Reader’s Digest Condensed Books? We stuck them on the shelves and smiled, perhaps suspecting even then what the future held: furtive midnight runs to Dumpsters about town, tossing in stacks of magazines and old textbooks, and scouring the Internet for patterns to make handbags, birdhouses, planters, and shelf brackets from old books. (Although I no longer had a yarn budget, I would have plenty of other crafts to mess about with.)

Actually, that’s hindsight talking; at the time we were so relieved that people brought us stuff, refusing anything never really entered our minds. We put every title on the shelf, no matter how old or uninviting. Everybody loved books! Everybody loved all books, all the time!
National Geographic
magazines were beautiful!

We didn’t have a clue.

People also came with useful genres, including the science fiction and Westerns we lacked. They got generous swap deals written into the big blue ledger, and left happy—to tell others about us. Word of mouth began to circulate, the best advertising one could ask for.

Many “rural suburbanites” are tucked into the snug hills and hollers that cradle Appalachia’s Coalfields; often growing tobacco on their family farm for extra cash, at least one adult commutes to a job in town. Since they didn’t live nearby as Dave and company did, this group took a little longer to find us, but as word rippled outward, they also brought in books.

Jack met Larry and Larry’s wife, Teddy—he a gentleman farmer, she retired from an illustrious career in Washington, D.C.—when they drove in from their farm one day “to see what all the fuss is about.” Jack and Larry struck up an instant and comfortable friendship, and it was Larry who gave us an early understanding of how Big Stone might be different from other small towns in which we’d lived.

While the Gap held the usual collection of doctors, lawyers, and educators, high-powered professionals wielded less real power locally than Old Families. As Larry explained it, “It’s not unlike medieval history; sure, it’s great to be king, but the Old Families put you on the throne, and they can take you off again. So don’t get uppity, because you never know who’s friends with an Old Family.”

Uppity, we didn’t plan on; busy would be enough, if our idea—okay, my sister’s idea—worked. And it did. Soon enough, our shop held bags, boxes, milk cartons, and plastic tubs full of stock, glorious stock. With each ragged, tatty plastic sack piled into a corner for sorting, Jack stood straighter. I leaned over boxes and sniffed that heady smell of books: dust, glue, and knowledge, all jumbled together. In our shop. Filling our shelves. Life was good.

Even better, people were talking about us. Friends told friends, and our phone began to ring. We weren’t open yet? When would we be? Did we have such and such books, or were we interested in having them brought in for swapping? Life was very good indeed.

Ultimately, we approached the Grand Opening with more than three thousand volumes we hadn’t gone into debt for, and a lot of friends we wouldn’t have made without the early swaps. Even better, nobody but Jack and I knew how close we’d come to looking like idiots who’d decided on a whim to start a bookstore and made it up as they went along.

C
HAPTER 4

Follow Your Ignorance Is Bliss

All you need is ignorance and confidence, and then success is sure.

—Mark Twain (aka Samuel Clemens) in a letter to his friend, Mrs. Foote, December 2, 1887

O
PENING OUR DOORS JUST THREE
months after buying the Edwardian presented many challenges, but also kept us from worrying about stuff; too busy hurling ourselves at an idyllic future to contemplate some very realistic potential pitfalls, we just kept smiling and didn’t look down.

Yet as the Grand Opening loomed, we got less sleep and more butterflies in our stomachs as all those words we weren’t saying hatched into living, fluttering fears. The night before we opened, lying sleepless and silent in bed, I rehearsed a litany of things that could go wrong: no one would come, no one would come, no one would come. Finally I said into the darkness: “What if no one comes?”

My husband reached down, picked up Bert (our terrier, asleep on my feet), and placed him in my arms like a teddy bear. Bert blinked, startled and bleary-eyed, as Jack said, “Go to sleep,” rolled over, and buried his good ear in the pillow.

I lay there, clutching the bemused Bert until morning.

Opening Day had been chosen to coincide with the annual Home Craft Days held at a nearby college. One of their shuttles stopped across the street from our store. We sneaked out in the wee hours and taped a flyer to the back of the shuttle stop sign: “Waiting for the bus? Why not spend a few minutes with us?” We got extra customers that way, and since we took the sign down as soon as Craft Days ended, the town manager only mentioned casually, a few days later when he happened to be passing by and just popped in for a cup of tea, that not everyone knew posting personal notices on public property was illegal within town limits.

The Grand Opening had that surreal quality of a wedding when it’s yours. Is this really happening? Did we actually pull it off? And is that kid sitting in the parked car out front using an e-reader? (We decided we didn’t believe in omens. A firm sense of denial can be a dreamer-turned-business-owner’s greatest asset.)

The mayor read a proclamation welcoming us to town and establishing our business. Adriana Trigiani, hometown girl and author of the bestselling Big Stone Gap series of novels, cut the ribbon. A shop full of ceremony attendees clapped; sure, they’d come to see Adri, but still filled our store to standing room only. They looked around. They bought things. We sold so many books that one shelf went bare again—but people were bringing books, too!

Throughout Opening Day we met more of those who would become regulars. Bill Peace is a Korean War veteran; that first morning he entered our shop, turned right with a military click of his heel, and worked his way around the room title by title. It took him an hour and a half. We thought his thoroughness was due to our low inventory, but as the months have rolled into years, Bill keeps that same pattern.

Thelma and Louise showed up as well; to this day, we don’t know what their real names are. Cheerful, laugh-a-minute addicts of gruesome crime novels, they made a beeline for our puny little stack of Tess Gerritsen thrillers and bought them all. Like Bill, they would repeat this pattern over the years, moving on to Lisa Jackson and Tami Hoag. I tried to get them started on Sandra Brown, but they had grossness limits.

Michael, a Lutheran lay minister, Eastern European history buff, adjunct college professor, and writer of horror stories—he’s a complicated man—planted the seed for a writing group on our opening day, and to our delight agreed to coordinate its monthly meetings when we approached him a few weeks later. This attracted Jenny—born and raised in Big Stone, a sweet-tempered actress in the local theater and the eldest daughter in a family full of characters—who balanced Mike’s horror with her romantic stories and insightful poetry. The group quickly collected then forementioned James, who in addition to poetry wrote guy stuff about trucks, space aliens, and why women were impossible to understand. The four of us would become fast friends—something I didn’t know on Opening Day, when Jenny handed over a batch of homemade bran muffins and began browsing.

Jenny wasn’t the only one to bring food; Melissa, who owned a shop selling Native American paraphernalia the next town over, brought cookies to wish us well, as did others on subsequent days. Appalachians bring food the way people from other cultures send flowers: to show appreciation, affection, sympathy and solidarity. Mike told me several years later that he went home from Opening Day and told his wife, “Yeah, it’s a nice place. I give ’em a year before they close.” (He thought there weren’t enough readers in town to keep a bookstore in business. He was not the only one: Jenny, James, even Teddy and Larry later admitted that they’d all thought either small-town politics or the small number of readers they thought were in the area would kill us within the year.)

We smiled, poured coffee, smiled, transacted sales, smiled, and bagged books until closing time. That night, in the fading ecstasy of the Grand Opening, Jack and I hid from street view in our upstairs front room, looked out over the main road of our new hometown, and poured ourselves a glass of wine. Jack, who had taught painting and decorating for fifteen years at a Scottish community college, had managed to find time and money to repaper our cozy hideaway in a soft mauve with small flowers sprigged throughout; furnished with our own ancient chest of drawers and a couple of scratchy wing chairs from the thrift store, covered in my crocheted antimacassars, it felt like the Victorian parlor it resembled. We curled into the yarn-softened seats and recounted the day, savoring each moment in detail. The customers’ enthusiasm for the shop’s woodwork. The food people had brought, unasked, to welcome us to town. My bright purple house shoes. I’d forgotten to change them before the mayor arrived, and had gone through the ceremony wearing fuzzy slippers—one of the first hints about how easily private and public space could slide into each other. I’d watched Adri notice my shoes and smile before turning away to greet a fan. She was too nice to comment.

When the day’s events finally had the flavor sucked out of them, we prepared for bed. As we brushed our teeth, Jack mused aloud over a comment from the mayor’s speech, “something about ‘not many people wanting to come here, and we hope you do well.’ Hardly the most ringing endorsement for a new business.” He spit.

Accustomed to Jack’s Scots dourness, I refused to allow him to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. “She was just welcoming us. C’mon, it was a wonderful day!”

And it had been. We turned off the lamp on the cardboard-box end table, snuggled up with Zora and Bert on our icy feet, and counted blessings: (1) enough savings to get a mortgage on this great location; (2) enough books to at least look like we were serious; (3) a bunch of first-day customers who’d promised to tell all their friends that a bookstore had moved in; (4) the goodwill of a town happy to have said bookstore; and (5) the handyman and crafter woman skills between us to make repairs, rugs, and furniture from scratch, rags, and plywood off-cuts well enough to live upstairs in a cheap-yet-cheerful manner, if not a gracious one.

Not bad for Day One, we thought. It felt like the perfect Hollywood ending. That’s the problem with Hollywood. It teaches us to revel in the end of a happy beginning without thinking realistically about what comes next. Cue the timpani and glorious sunset; love conquers all.

Ha.

We should have paid more attention to that odd little phrase stuck in the middle of the mayor’s welcoming speech. We should have revisited our fears, spoken that day in Little Mexico, that a population of five thousand was minuscule for a customer pool. But Day One had been a rousing success, and deep in our hearts Jack and I simply could not imagine a life without books and words and the smell of paper, so we resolutely rejected the possibility that our bookstore could flop in short order. Big Stone’s enthusiastic welcome gave us hope and a sense of belonging. We believed in our new friends—the swooning Isabel and her sensible, math-teaching husband, William; pragmatic and kindhearted Teri and Gary; Fiona the Garage Sale Queen; writers James, Michael, and Jenny; and Elissa, insurance adjuster by day, and a brilliant freelance photographer who’d shown up to our opening. They were the first of many artists the bookstore would attract, along with informally educated intellectuals looking for serious conversation unleavened by accent assumptions, and all those rural suburbanites out there in the valleys, who just wanted a little light reading at the end of a hard workweek. We basked in the camaraderie and support shown by the region’s bibliophiles, and felt well on the way toward a quieter, saner, happier life.

Quiet. Yes, that it would be, in spades.

We opened in October; by Thanksgiving, up to four customers a day trickled through our shop. Our understocked, underadvertised, overstaffed shop. Bill, Thelma and Louise, the writing group, and a few new customers drifted through: just the usual suspects plus just a handful of others.