The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap by Wendy Welch Page A

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.”
    “How do we stick around if no one takes us seriously enough to shop here?” I whined, although his rebound analogy made me grin. It’s hard to whine and grin at the same time.
    He grinned back. “That, baby girl, is the part we ain’t figured out yet. Now pull up your bootstraps and prove you can be part of this place. And, honey, don’t give anyone more power than they’ve got. There’s plenty of locals can see the good in having a new business run by nice people. People like havin’ a bookstore, I know; they tell me. And there’s plenty of ’em as like you and Jack; they like all that crazy stuff you two organize. The rest’ll come around. Give ’em time.”
    Exit power-player pal, coffee refill in travel mug. He didn’t drop any change in the donation pot for it.
    Garth was right; I had openly said we were “just trying out” the idea of a bookstore. We’d refused to go into debt just so we could make a clean getaway if needed; Jack called the little protected lump in our bank account “Wendy’s emergency flight fund.” Partly that caution stemmed from still feeling unsettled; letting anyone else know how important my bookshop was to me would make me vulnerable again. It had been a casual acquaintance, something we could walk away from easily. Problem was, now we were in love with Big Stone.
    That “we might stay, we might not” had also been hedging our bets against straight-out failure. Like the rest of the community, we hadn’t been sure a bookstore would work, mentally or physically.
    A crazy little three-part syllogism echoes like a drumbeat through the Appalachian Coalfields: people outstanding in their field can go anywhere they want; you are here; therefore, you must not be very good at what you do, because who wants to be here?
    The Coalfields are emptying. If you ask someone outside Central Appalachia to name our region’s top export, they would say coal, but the more accurate answer is college students. Newly minted, educated adults make up what’s called in British Isles history “a bloody Flight of Earls.” The best and brightest of the eighteen-to-twenty-five-year-olds flee this scenic wonderland of economic stagnation with their entrepreneurial spirits, energy, ideas, and babies, headed for the cities. The county’s population drops by something like 5 percent every year, mostly young’uns crazy to hurl themselves against the walls of what they figure will be a larger life.