The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap Read Online Free PDF

enterprise into something like an adoption agency. We felt a vested interest in seeing the little guys go to good homes. Once the bookstore opened, our friend Neva Bryan, an author herself, bought a book autographed by one of my writer friends. Neva glowed over her find, while I was happy because My Friend the Book went to live with My Friend the Writer; they would appreciate and look after each other.
    But Neva and the rest of our customers waited in the future (we hoped) as we prepared for the Grand Opening—which wasn’t looking too grand, in all honesty. The books from our personal cull barely filled half of one room’s shelves, yet three rooms waited. It didn’t feel cozy or full of promise, more barren and tomblike. Lacking money to buy more, we tried laying the books flat, end to end. That took up shelf space, but it pretty much looked like a book morgue.
    Surveying the scene of our crime novels, we took stock of, well … the stock. Closing the door on the back room full of empty bookcases helped, but that glorious, open-plan, long front suite with its oak columns and sweet, sticky pocket doors, where we dreamed of patrons edging along overstuffed shelves, remained a veritable cavern with nothing in it but books lying sideways. The word “ridiculous” hovered in the background. Even those with no retail skills whatsoever (namely, us) could see our meager stock foretold doom.
    One evening I came down the wooden stair with its beautiful copper corner pieces, which I planned to shine back to perfection someday after we got the shop ready, and beheld my beloved sitting at the bottom. Shoulders slumped, chin resting in hands, he sat with an empty whiskey glass at his knee. We didn’t have money for extras; Jack dipping into his water-of-life reserve meant things were bad.
    I sat down beside him and together we surveyed the emptiness that embodied our leaped-before-looking stupidity.
    Jack sighed. “Perhaps I shouldn’t have installed quite so many sleepbuilts at the start. We could have put in some more furniture, armchairs, that sort of thing.” (Jack called his shelf design “sleepbuilts,” because they were super-easy to make, and he’d built so many that he could do one in his sleep. I called them that because the saw and Jack’s snoring produced a similar sound.)
    “Where would we have gotten money for armchairs?” I asked. We had already put our personal couch downstairs in one of the front rooms and broken up our dining set, its table holding the shop’s coffee and tea service, chairs spread across the store. Upstairs we had our bedroom furniture, a couple of plastic four-drawer units, and a lot of cardboard boxes.
    Jack shrugged. “I’m not too old to search skips.” Search skips is Scottish for Dumpster diving. Sounds better in Scots, doesn’t it?
    Now, you should know that Jack is just an inch or two taller than I am. If you chose to describe me as “cozily round,” or even use Alexander McCall Smith’s tactful “traditionally built,” that would be a fair cop. Jack, however, is lean muscle in a compact package. Wiry, they calls it in the Old World. He can carry three two-by-fours with ease, yet not see over the edge of a Dumpster standing on tiptoe. The image of my beloved swimming up to his eyebrows in pizza boxes and old diapers made me giggle. Where there’s giggling, there’s hope. Hope coupled with hard work can trump even stupidity. Yes, we’d been silly in our failure to plan, but in the month since we had committed to a bookstore, as we’d built shelves and sifted books, the shop had moved from an antidote to the Snake Pit to having its own meaning. Le bookshop, c’est moi. Or us, in this case.
    We’d gone from the rather selfish need to heal ourselves, to providing something a whole bunch of nice people had taken the time to tell us they looked forward to having. Locals strolled up the sidewalk, stopped us in the grocery store, chatted after church about when we would be