The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap: A Memoir of Friendship, Community, and the Uncommon Pleasure of a Good Book

Prologue

Let me live in a house by the side of the road

Where the race of men go by—

The men who are good and the men who are bad,

As good and as bad as I.

I would not sit in the scorner’s seat

Nor hurl the cynic’s ban—

Let me live in a house by the side of the road

And be a friend to man.

—Sam Foss, The House by the Side of the Road, from Dreams in Homespun

THREE AM. SLEEP WAS GONE. My mind whirled with boxes to unpack, items to find.

Sliding from under the cat curled on my chest—she opened one eye and indicated displeasure—I crept toward the stairs. From behind came a soft whump as our Labrador gained the mattress, made peace with the cat, and claimed the sleep that eluded me.

Downstairs, an electric kettle sat next to the tea chest on an otherwise empty counter, testament to my Scottish husband’s priorities. I made a mug of raspberry tea and wandered into the large front room. The cavernous house, walls lined with empty bookshelves, stretched into dark nothingness, waiting. In the middle of the room my laptop rested on an old mission table, the only other furniture. Both looked dwarfed and out of place.

I could relate. Since arriving in Big Stone Gap, Virginia, Jack and I had been living as gracefully as fish astride mopeds. On something dangerously close to a whim, we became the broke and terrified owners of a five-bedroom, three-bath-with-one-working Edwardian mansion, complete with squeaky hardwood floors and a leaking roof. Under the influence of salsa and sangria, we’d decided to turn this house into a used book store, or die trying.

Probably the latter, I thought, watching the Internet fire up against the blue-gray darkness. What are we doing here, anyway? This is the kind of town you see in true crime documentaries, where the bodies are never found because the locals don’t tell.

Jack had just yesterday erected a gigantic sign in four-hundred-point type, announcing USED BOOK STORE OPENING SOON. That pretty much cemented our status as those new weirdos in the old Meade house. Passersby who stopped to read the sign made encouraging comments along the lines of, A bookstore? You’re nuts!

For which were we nuts, I wanted to ask: For pretending we’d never heard of iPads, e-books, and Kindles? For thinking a town coping with its own dying coal industry would support a new business? Believing the downturned economy would swing upward soon? Hoping that the old guard in a notoriously insular region might welcome new kids onto the block? Or, our worst nightmare, for all of the above?

Headlights swung in a wide arc outside, startling me from doom-laden reverie. A siren emitted a single whoop amid a sudden blue flash. Must be pulling over a drunk driver, I thought. Our would-be bookstore sat along the top of a T-intersection. A police SUV hovered in its junction as a spotlight lit the front room. Curtainless floor-to-ceiling windows left us naked to outside eyes, but why were the police investigating at three in the morning?

The Bronco drove around the corner and tried to enter a grass driveway at the side yard. The chain-link fence—a priority because of our born-to-ramble dogs—had gone up as soon as we moved in, closing off that drive. Now the SUV stopped inches from the mesh; if a vehicle could look frustrated, this one did. It turned and chugged back around the corner, pulling up at our curb. The driver’s door opened. Running a hand over my tangled mass of red hair, I belted Jack’s bathrobe tighter and opened the front door.

Or tried to. It was original to this 1903 monstrosity we now owned, so I managed to turn the brass lock, but the warped wooden frame stuck. A keyhole sat below the knob, looking smug. Was the door locked? Where was that key? Had we found it yet? I tugged again. Nothing.

A short, squat shadow came striding up the stairs. This is how people get shot! I thought, envisioning the officer’s view from the other side—a dark body mass struggling with an object just out of sight. I waved in an I come in peace sort of way.

The policeman put a hand to his holster.

Hang on! I called through the glass. The door won’t open! I gave a mighty tug and the knob fell into my hand as the door flew wide, throwing me off balance; raspberry tea sloshed onto the floor and the bathrobe belt slackened. Slipping the doorknob into a pocket, tightening my grip on the mug, and tossing hair from my eyes, I stepped barefoot onto the porch to say, Good morning, Officer.

His eyes swept over hair, robe, mug, feet. Do you live here?

No, I’m a burglar; the tea is for cover. Tempting though it was, commonsense pistons fired in time, and instead I replied, Yes, sir.

Mmm. He pushed his gun, hovering an alarming two inches from its holster, back into place.

My husband and I just bought this house.

What for?

Because we’re nuts. We’re opening a bookstore.

A bookstore? You’re nuts! He slapped his thigh in gleeful emphasis.

So I believe. Were you pulling someone over for drunk driving? Why are we having this conversation in the middle of the night?

The officer stared as if I truly were insane. What? This is an official safety check. I figured burglars since I saw movement and light.

And they put up signs and erected a chain-link fence? Aloud I replied, Nope, just harmless little Jack and Wendy. I had insomnia and came down to use the computer. But I saw you in the intersection when your siren … um, blipped.

The officer averted his gaze, rocking on the balls of his feet. Oh. Yeah. I hit the wrong button.

Okay, that was endearing, so we stood on the porch and talked into the dark. Grundy, as he introduced himself, planned to retire in six months. His brother, a successful surgeon, owned a place in the Florida Keys, a palatial home of seven bedrooms, cathedral ceilings, and a sauna, to which Grundy had yet to be invited. Grundy attended church every Sunday, was a member of the Kiwanis club, voted in all civic elections, but it was his brother who had millions, and if you asked Grundy it was down to insurance fraud.

Ain’t that the way of it? my new friend lamented. Me in public service, him getting rich.

Grundy knew the elderly women who’d shared the house before us. Looked in on ’em from time to time, he said, eyebrows wiggling in a way it seemed wise not to explore. After the former owner went to a nursing home, her friend had been evicted without ceremony. Got the lawyer’s letter at noon, she was out on the street by four.

I emitted a sympathetic noise.

"Don’t feel sorry for her. Con artist of the first water. Probably owes money to everybody from here to the state line."

Oh, I said.

Since they left, I usually drive up in the yard, check the house, make sure everything’s all right. Couldn’t do that tonight. Fence in the way. He squinted at me in an accusing manner.

We have a black Lab, Zora. She’s a good watchdog. Asleep, upstairs. And Bert, our terrier, is a total yipster. Barks at everything. Also sound asleep.

He nodded, apparently relieved that his duties had passed to qualified personnel.

By the time Grundy shook my hand farewell, dawn had slipped its early promises into the sky. He started for the steps, then looked back. Y’know, it’s great y’all are putting in a bookstore. Not a lot to do around here. I’ll come see you after I retire. I like Westerns.

It felt good, that tossed-off tacit approval. Like being given the key to the city. Town. Village. Front door.

As I turned toward the house, a brief whoop sounded and a blue flash lit the intersection. Grundy rolled down his window. Gol durn it! he called with a smiling shrug, then lifted his hat in salute and drove into the sunrise.

The front door wouldn’t lock, but so what? Grundy watched over us as we slept.

Upstairs, my husband opened one dozy eye and watched me trick our Labrador off the mattress with the doorknob. Is that from the front door? Jack asked as Zora, realizing she’d been had, dropped the brass ball with a sarcastic clunk and padded into the hallway, followed by a sleepy Bert.

We now know someone in this town. I gave him a brief rundown of meeting Grundy.

Jack shook his head, eyes closed. We’re going to fit right in here, he said, and pushed his face into the pillow.

Dear Lord, I hope so, I prayed silently into the graying light.

CHAPTER 1

How to Be Attacked by Your Heart’s Desire

Ever since happiness heard your name, it has been running through the streets trying to find you.

—Hafiz of Persia

PEOPLE TALK ABOUT FOLLOWING THEIR bliss, but if you’re stubborn, unobservant sods like Jack and me, your bliss pretty much has to beat you over the head until you see things in a new light. By the time Jack and I met, some twelve years before the bookstore in Big Stone Gap entered our lives, we had between us lived in eight countries and visited more than forty; the first five years of our marriage were spent in Jack’s native Scotland as cheerful workaholics with pretensions to vagabond artistry. His salary as a college department head and mine for directing an arts nonprofit afforded us fulfilling lives of music, story, friends, and travel throughout the British Isles and the States.

Since we’d married late in Jack’s life, the second time for him and the first for me, an awareness of our age difference (twenty years) kept an easy balance going. The undertow of time’s river reminded us to be happy with each other while we had the chance. With this in mind, we slid our day jobs between hop-away weekends performing stories and songs at festivals, fairs, and conferences. At first, Jack sang and I told stories, but as the years rolled by, his song introductions got longer and I sang more ballads until we were pretty much both doing both.

Driving home from these road trips tired and happy, Jack and I often engaged in casual banter about what we’d do someday when we gave up the weekend warrior routine. Such conversations revolved around a recurring theme:

Someday we’ll give up this madness, settle down, and run a nice bookstore, I’d say.

A used book store, with a café that serves locally grown food, he’d agree.

It will have incredibly beautiful hardwood floors that squeak when you walk across them.

Lots of big windows to let in the sunlight, as it will of course face south.

In a town with tree-lined streets, where there’s lots of foot traffic so people walk in on impulse. Everyone will love us as colorful local characters. You can wear a baggy Mr. Rogers sweater and push your glasses up your nose and talk about Scotland, and I can teach at the nearby university and write the great American novel.

It will have high ceilings with old-fashioned wooden fans. Jack liked to stick to physical descriptions.

And a unicorn in the garden. Two can play at that game.

Of course! It will keep the elephants company. My husband is a go-with-the-flow kind of guy.

Mile after road-weary mile, we created castle-in-the-clouds daydreams about the used book store we would run someday. When the five-thousand-square-foot personification of this idle pastime appeared without warning at a most inconvenient moment, it didn’t so much enter as take over our lives.

We didn’t arrive in Big Stone intending to run a used book store, and in fact we almost passed up the chance when presented with it. Two years before we moved to Virginia, we had left the United Kingdom for the States so I could take a position in the Snake Pit. (That’s not its real name, in case you were wondering.) That move landed me in a high-power game of snakes and ladders in a government agency—except we played with all snakes and no ladders. In this bite or be bitten ethos, it really didn’t matter what was true; it mattered whether you could bite harder than you were bitten—and that you never questioned why biting was the preferred method of communication.

Freedom might be another word for nothing left to lose, or the moment when common sense blossoms through the mud. One fine day I woke up seeing clearly for the first time in two years. A willing entrant into the Snake Pit—because the job looked exciting and as though it offered chances to do good in the world—I’d become instead just another biter. No, thank you; life is not about who gets the biggest chunk of someone else’s flesh.

Unless you’re a zombie.

I talked to a lawyer, gave two weeks’ notice, and walked away. Almost everyone has experienced a Snake Pit at some point in their lives—more’s the pity. Bad as our Pit was, Jack and I were fortunate. We owned our house and don’t eat much, so we could call it quits. That’s a luxury many people stuck in horrible situations—from minimum wage to white collar—don’t share. Sensitive humans doing a job they hate to keep food on the family table or a kid in school deserve major honor. If you’re in that position, kudos for sticking it out. God grant you an exit ramp soon, and forbearance until it appears.

For Jack and me, exiting Pitsville seemed like a bad cliché: midlife crisis meets crisis of conscience. The Fourteenth Dalai Lama expressed sympathy for anyone who lives as if he is never going to die, and then dies having never really lived. C. S. Lewis said almost the same thing in The Screwtape Letters, that people who suddenly wake up in the middle of some important activity and ask themselves, am I enjoying this? rarely answer yes, yet spend their lives doing the same things anyway.

Living in a world with no moral center had thrown us into an off-kilter limbo. We longed to return to a gentle life with friendly people who had less to prove and more honesty in how they proved it. So when I was offered a low-profile job running educational programs in the tiny southwestern Virginia town of Big Stone Gap, we packed our bags and shook the venom from our shoes.

Big Stone (as the locals call it) is nestled in the mountains of central Appalachia, in what locals call the Coalfields. The town had been on its way to becoming the Chicago of the South in the early 1900s, until the coal boom went bust. Now it was just another dot on the map, full of coal miners and retirees, with an embattled downtown and a Walmart up by the four-lane. Football games and high school reunions were the biggest local events.

A nice gentle job in The Gap (its other nickname) seemed a good situation in a pleasant place; we could hang out for a year enjoying life in the slow lane without getting too attached. I’m from central Appalachia, Jack from Scotland. Mountains and rural living are some of the ties that bind us.

While helping us look for housing cheap enough to be realistic yet cozy enough to be comfortable, Debbie, the affable local realtor, discovered we liked old houses. Her company had just acquired one she hadn’t yet seen, so we stopped and explored it together, just to take a break.

That’s how the Bookstore ensnared us. Edith Schaeffer, who with her husband cofounded a Christian commune called L’Abri, once wrote, The thing about real life is that important events don’t announce themselves. Trumpets don’t blow … Usually something that is going to change your whole life is a memory before you can stop and be impressed about it.

That about sums it up.

The five-bedroom 1903 Edwardian sat near two intersections, and edged a neighborhood of sturdy brick homes and leafy bungalows. Parking spaces dotted the front curb. The place felt snug and cozy the moment we walked in, despite its voluminous size.

Squeaky floors, my husband said with a frown, rubbing one rubber sole across the scarred hardwood.

The pocket doors stick, Debbie observed, sneezing as she wrestled oak panels from their hiding places amid a shower of dust.

That’s a lot of windows for somebody to wash. I pointed at the floor-to-ceiling panes adorning three open-plan rooms, stretched across the southern-facing house front.

Rickety wooden fans hung from high ceilings, wires exposed. The second-floor parlor, with its peeling wallpaper, overlooked the town’s tree-lined ancillary street one block from where it intersected the main road. The ghost of cat pee wafted from the oak staircase, which boasted exquisite copper corner pieces dulled by neglect. My husband and I stared at each other with lust in our eyes, thanked Debbie-the-Realtor for the impromptu visit, and left her making notes of things to fix before the house could be put on the market.

From the Edwardian mansion, Jack and I headed to Little Mexico, a signature Big Stone Gap restaurant. Little Mexico sits at the top of a hill next to Walmart, and the parking lot offers magnificent views of the surrounding mountains. The season’s flowering power—rhododendron pink, mountain laurel white, cornflower purple—displayed its full glory in the midday sun. Inside, we dipped tortilla chips into fiery salsa and eyed each other through sangria glasses.

We had no money. We’d bought a house in the Snake Pit with cash when we first came over from Scotland, but the economy had just tanked while the housing market crashed amid escalating horror stories; no way would we be able to sell that house quickly. Thus we couldn’t afford to buy without getting a mortgage, and given the nose-diving economy and the limited appeal my esoteric PhD in ethnography had in the job market, that didn’t seem wise. We needed to just park ourselves quietly for a year and regroup. It was madness to even think along unicorn-in-the-garden lines. No, the word bookstore would not come out of my mouth.

Jack crunched a corn chip. That big white house would have made a perfect bookstore, had it been in a bigger town.

I knew it! Oh, did you think so?

My husband of ten years smiled. I knew that’s what you were thinking. Debbie said the population is 5,400. That’s not enough people to support a bookstore, and anyway we won’t be here that long.

Yep, I agreed. Stupid to get entangled in something like that now, when we’re so tired and, you know, off balance.

Aye. Not to mention, we don’t have enough money.

Or energy. Pity to see something so nice and not be able to take advantage of it, but the timing is so wrong. We need a sure thing. I’ll handle this job for a year or two, and you can find some relaxing retirement project.

Jack waited a beat, then said thoughtfully, But if we were to stay a wee while longer, there is a college nearby where you might teach … well, not that we’re thinking of long-term plans now.

My heartbeat accelerated. No, not that we’re thinking long-term.

We’ll set up a bookstore someday.

Mhmm. Someday.

We crunched in silence, and then Jack drew his sword and slew the dragon. What if someday is today?

Not even a gentle pop resounded as the cork flew from our bottled-up lives. But the waitstaff seemed startled when I leaned across the table, stomach grazing the chip basket, and kissed my best friend long and hard on the lips.

CHAPTER 2

No Longer Renting the Space Inside My Skin

Oh the water is wide, I can’t cross o’er.

Neither have I wings to fly.

Build me a boat that will carry two,

And both shall row, my love and I.

—Scottish folk song

THE INK WASN’T DRY ON my signature before I regretted the impulsive, made-with-the-heart-not-the-head decision to buy that house at the side of the road. Sure, we’ve all heard the Dr. Phil chatter: follow your bliss and the money will follow.

Yeah, right. Anybody out there still unaware that life does not always resemble a Hallmark commercial? Bank accounts are amazing reality checks—no pun intended.

The Edwardian wanted structural fixing, while our minuscule savings needed cash injections, not drainage. Buying that big white elephant would be driving on the wrong side of the money highway. A house back at the Snake Pit waited to be sold in the tanking real estate market. The word recession loomed in nightly news stories. The quiet little position I’d come to town for was not PhD level, and a couple of staff members already wondered openly what I was doing there. (The job was with the same type of state organization as the toxic one I’d fled had been, which those with the foresight God gave mayflies might call a dumb move. We would call it that, and many other things besides, in the coming months.) I had defended my doctoral dissertation just as the economy—along with university hiring—was drying up. The possible safety net of something opening at one of the two area colleges, should my day job go away, was not a strong bet. A safety net that lacks enough strength to catch you really isn’t much of a safety net, is it?

Stacked against all that, we had two very important things going for us: we believed in ourselves and each other, and we were desperate. We craved returning to a sweet, happy, slow life. A lot of money wasn’t important—just enough to eat, sleep, and stay warm through the winter. All we asked was to contribute something to a community and derive pleasure from doing so—plus health