The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap (10 page)

I’d never been called an elegant gossip before, but given that small towns are pretty much fueled by gossip and church suppers, likely someone had at some point called us something worse. And it was a fair cop. I do tend to overthink and underact in most situations; Jack says my solution to any problem is to analyze it into submission.

Besides, Witold was really asking a specific question. As Jane Austen noted, a man in possession of a comfortable home and good fortune must be in want of a wife. The fortysomething market of eligible bachelors tends to run low in Big Stone Gap. Our tall, gray-eyed, college professor friend, fabulous classical guitarist, cook par excellence and adept handyman, excited interest among breasted Americans—and he knew it.

What most people didn’t know, although Anne, Jack, and I did, was that Witold had for the last year been trying very hard to marry someone, a lovely woman named Ashia, waiting in Poland behind a tight net of international regulations about bringing her children into a foreign country on a marriage visa.

Privacy is a carefully guarded commodity in modern America, so I knew Witold had subtly asked me how many people knew about his fiancée. Still, I couldn’t resist the rare opportunity to get one over on the guy.

“Well, I just tell anyone who asks that your former life partner Anne used to be a guy, but after her successful sex change it didn’t work for the two of you as a couple anymore, but you’d parted amiably, as evidenced by the sharing of Josephine, your dog.”

Witold let that sift through his English-to-Polish filter as Jack and Anne howled with laughter. Then he rose without a word, took up the plate bearing my slice of mushroom-Gruyère quiche with raspberry chutney garnish, and set it down in front of Josie.

But Witold doesn’t hold a grudge. When he and Ashia were finally able to marry a couple of years later, we hosted their wedding shower at the bookstore. Themed “Essentials for Establishing a Comfortable American Home,” among its gifts were six rolls of duct tape in assorted colors, a collection of plastic cups from fast-food establishments, a coffee can of rusty nuts and bolts, and a lifetime supply of Tupperware containers with unmatched lids. We toasted the bride and groom with wine drunk from another gift: a dozen mugs advertising tourist traps no one could remember visiting.

But going back to that night at Witold’s house, not long after our first successful ceilidh dance and an International Night debut, his casual comment about a “community center” gave us our first indication that the bookstore was making its mark. A throwaway line to him, it reverberated as we walked home.

Jack said, “Community center. There you go. I believe we might just be in with the bricks.”

Terribly British, really. At the moment when I most felt like jumping up and down screaming, “We did it! We’re in, we’re in!” my husband squeezed my hand and said, “Good for us.”

Good for us? Indeed. Keep calm and carry on.

So we went back to thinking up crazy stunts—er, special events—to hold at the bookstore. We celebrated Old World holidays as they appeared on the calendar: Burns Night, St. Andrew’s Night, Celtic Christmas. I’d always wanted to run a murder mystery, so we started hosting them twice a year, featuring a recurring character: book-slinger John Bach, who with each subsequent murder becomes more nervous as people keep dying in his place of business. My husband dislikes acting despite his innate talent for it, so he really hams it up; I think repressed distaste at having to play the role fuels his growing despair as Bach.

Murders we have held include “Oh Dear oh Deer” featuring Dirk Deerslayer, a ladykiller and deer hunter who finally got his comeuppance surrounded by the beauty queens he’d spurned in years past; “Death Among the Cookbooks,” the tale of two offed spinster sister authors and “a list of suspects longer than a lasagna noodle”; and “Books Run Amok,” in which Jane Eyre stabbed Hester Prynne in a case of mistaken identity after Anna Karenina and Rhett Butler had a tryst in the mystery room, Long John Silver and Rip Van Winkle proved unreliable witnesses due to intoxication, and Miss Marple ran off with Jay Gatsby. Members of the writing group usually sculpt the plots, although Grace, Jack’s guitar student; Jodi, a former local reporter who took a city government job and knows where all the bodies are buried (literally and figuratively); and Elissa, my photographer friend, have each created one as well. Murders involving town officials proved to be especially popular (no comment). All our victims have been great sports about being bludgeoned, poisoned, shot, or otherwise done in. As one recent murderee commented, “Honey, it beats election night.”

Surrounded by these and other silly activities, we went whistling forward, advancing confidently in the direction of our dreams. Up to our ears in special events and paperbacks, we were meeting interesting new customers every day, gaining friends, establishing our reputation as a community center where people wanted to be. We thought we were “in.” And we were, once again, blissfully ignorant. We had no idea how easily we could lose that goodwill, reputation, and customer base in one fell swoop.

C
HAPTER 7

God Bless You for Trying, Losers

Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn. My God, do you learn.

—C. S. Lewis, from one of his popular lecture topics

M
URDER TURNED TO CHARACTER ASSASSINATION
just a few weeks later, when we fell afoul of a town clique. My day job’s boss held a long-standing position in an intricate network of Old Families and locals; when that job fell apart, so did the shop’s navigation system through those mazes of interrelations.

Why I’d left one government agency for the same bureaucracy in another state remains a mystery filed under Sudden Flight from Common Sense, but I did. One day my boss helped me understand that my job was on the line unless I changed my thinking on a couple of key issues. For me, those issues represented the very core of what I considered integrity, and I lost it.

A part of me constantly regretted not standing my ground in the Snake Pit; I’d made a decision not to get embroiled further and fled, but with hindsight, that move felt less like taking the moral high ground, and more like getting the hell out of Dodge. Now here I stood with a second chance at speaking up for truth, justice, and social equity. (Cue the orchestra’s string section.)

I said what I thought, got fired, and walked home rejoicing to be a member of the “went down with integrity” club at last. Yes, that’s called a martyr complex, and it’s neither logical nor clever, but oh, it felt so good when all that bottled-up compliance exploded into one loud (and fairly self-righteous) “NO!”

Those of you who have lived in a small town will know that a firing is almost as good as a car wreck for the topic of lunch conversations. In the immediate aftermath, the local business association’s head refused to display our flyers in her shop window; our friend and town councilor Garth asked another councilor if she’d ever visited the bookstore, and she replied, “I hadn’t thought about it”; and we got “inadvertently left off” a list of businesses eligible for a community award.
You have offended one of our own; have the good sense to go quietly,
the unspoken message came via not-entirely-subtle channels—even as our customer pool grew.

If we’d had any sense, there wouldn’t have been a bookstore in the first place. Sweet irony: looking back, we now realize that at the moment when it would have made the most sense to pack up, the possibility had disappeared from our minds. In choosing not to—actually, not so much choosing as forgetting we had the option—we weren’t being thrawn (that’s Scottish for stubborn); it’s just that we had a dream going, and Jack had promised no more drifting, no living on other people’s agendas. Our bookstore, do or die. All for one, and buy one, get one free.

As each day went by, we wanted more and more to stay in Big Stone. Every Thursday, my hubby would pull open the weekly paper and read aloud the news columns from various contributors—about grandchildren coming to visit, families who went out to eat, opinions on the color someone had painted her house: sweet news from genuine people living a quiet life well.

We really, really wanted a piece of that non-action.

Not only were the people genuine
and
fun—albeit since I got fired some no longer held the same opinion of us—but the physical town of Big Stone Gap is truly, madly, amazingly beautiful. A bowl of mountains alternates between surreal morning fogs, snowy slopes, summer flowers, and the splendor of autumn’s leaves. The Gap dazzles the eye in every season. Even the downtown buildings, shabby from years of economic downturn, show the most interesting span of twentieth-century architecture one could find in a single location.

In short, Big Stone looked like a great place to spend the rest of our lives. I don’t remember a moment when we looked at each other and said, “We’re not leaving, are we?” but Jack and I both knew we weren’t going anywhere if we could help it. We’d fallen in love, and that meant settling in for the long haul.

So instead of packing up in the face of adversity, we dug into our extra energy reserves, prepared to eat air, and with increased free time and desperation, delivered flyers advertising our special events to a widening circle of banks and clinics and hairdressers, chatting to potential customers all the way. Lots of new people did come to see us as a result of our efforts, while a few of our regulars stopped—not very many, just a couple. A friend from my former job had amassed quite a healthy credit in our blue ledger of trade swaps; the afternoon of my firing, she arrived with her adult daughter in tow, wiped out the balance with four armloads of paperbacks, and disappeared. We never saw her or her children again.

That kind of thing let us know how the back-alley gossip hummed; we figured we could beat it over time, but it’s no fun when people are suspicious of you. The “you aren’t from here” snake, which everyone who moves into a small community deals with at some point, became a hydra rearing its ugly “you aren’t one of us, you won’t ever understand us, you’re trying to change us, you’re the outsiders who will never be accepted” heads—and in an extra ironic twist, that suspicion appeared because of losing my job, an act I believed had returned my integrity.
Won’t be a snake in the pit? Okay, how about a shut-out failure instead?

Most of us have figured out by now that those aren’t the only two choices life offers. It bothered me that people thought ill of us, but it didn’t define me. Or Jack. Or the bookstore. We were more concerned about the effect it might have on our customer pool, which slumped in the weeks after I got sent home in disgrace.

Soon after I got fired, Garth popped in for coffee and asked how we were doing. I spent the next ten minutes ranting and raving in full-blown Pity Party mode. How we had people we didn’t even know calling us “uppity incomers,” and—even worse—people we barely knew running in to gleefully tell us that we were getting called that. How the other chamber-of-commerce types wouldn’t come near the shop.

When I finally exhausted myself and sat down at my antique kitchen table—sacrificed to hosting the store’s coffee service where we offered
free coffee
, so why weren’t people taking us up on it?!—my wise friend said, “Honey, this ain’t got as much to do with you gettin’ fired as people wonderin’ if you’re gonna stay. I know you and Jack are good people, but you look like every other City Sophisticate Discovering Rural Paradise. They set up a business, it makes money or doesn’t, they fold up and get a tax write-off, or they take off with the loot back to the city. Ain’t nobody thinks you’re really gonna stay very long. You’ve got no ties to the community, so why should they bother to make friends? It’s like fosterin’ a puppy; sure, it’s sweet, but don’t get attached ’cause you’ll just get your heart broke when it goes.”

“Ties to the community?” I shot back. “You mean like having a
real
job in town, not just a bookstore we didn’t ask anyone’s permission to start but that just might make it despite the in-club not shopping here, because a bunch of other really nice people are?”

Garth rocked back in his chair and lifted the brim of his cap—and beamed at me. “Well, sweetheart, you
do
have a bit of spark left in you. Good. I was afraid the last little while mighta burned you out.”

I hate it when men who are neither my husband nor my uncle call me sweetheart, but it also seemed like a good moment to keep my mouth shut and let him talk. Garth returned the chair’s front two legs to the ground with a thud, leaned forward, and crossed his arms on the table, locking eyes with me. “Yeah, honey, that’s what they mean. You got no reason to stay now, have you?”

“I’ve got about 5,200 reasons,” I replied, waving my hand at the bookshelves, “and that doesn’t count the friends we’ve made, like Mike and Heather and Teri and…” I stopped as Garth smiled again.

“So you think you belong here now, got a good life goin’? Fine. Prove you’re someone who belongs here. ’Cause you been sayin’ all along, right from the day you opened, that you an’ Jack were ‘just tryin’ out this bookstore thing, gonna see if it could work.’ So make it work.”

In Scotland, that’s called getting hoisted by your own petard, when something you say comes back to haunt you. But I wasn’t ready to admit culpability yet.

“At our opening day, they talked about how great it was to see economic development, new entrepreneurs, all that, and now they don’t shop here just because one of their friends is mad at me.” I all but sniffed, wiping an imaginary spill from the coffee counter.

Garth snorted. “Cut the princess crap, sister. You and I both know small towns are all about who’s friends with who. You pissed off somebody’s friend; give it time and it’ll blow over—assumin’ you’re comittin’ for the long haul. Why should anyone commit to you if you’re just playin’ around? You got to be around a while, show a little respect and humility for our way of life here in town, before anyone’ll take you seriously. Suspicion’s always earned, just not necessarily by the people it falls on. Haven’t you ever dated somebody on the rebound? This whole town is on the rebound.”