Read The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap for Free Online Page B

chatting up sale-holders, other shoppers, anyone I met on the sidewalk, telling them about our new shop and its October opening.
    Even with Fiona by my side throughout August, stock count reached a mere twenty-two hundred. The back-room door remained closed. Across the front rooms, we now resembled a crowded book morgue; the books still lay end to end, but at least they touched each other.
    To make matters worse, we didn’t just have a dearth of books overall; in one key genre, we had none. Science fiction and fantasy rarely appear at yard sales, for reasons we learned later. With two colleges in the region, that seemed an unwise inventory hole.
    Desperation set in, but not the useful kind that spurs invention—more the dark, debilitating variety so familiar from days of yore. Jack said to me, as I moped through the house one day, picking up dead books and putting them down on a different shelf, “You haven’t acted so listless in a long while. Not since, er, you know where. Giving up so soon?”
    That snapped me out of it, and fast. No more renting the space in our own skins. The book morgue that wanted to be a shop was our problem, waiting for our solution. By hook, crook, or sheer force of will, we would find more books—without going into debt for them.
    Don’t get the wrong idea: Jack and I were not destitute when we moved to Big Stone. But that “let’s make a bookstore” discussion in Little Mexico had not been entirely heart without head. We’d talked at length about how financially insecure running such an enterprise would be. Thumbing our nose at the Snake Pit had been possible only because we had no mortgage or significant debt. That kind of freedom must be carefully guarded, or going into debt “just this once” becomes a lifestyle. So we had sworn, the day we agreed to try the bookstore thing, that we would get the necessary mortgage, but would not borrow a single penny more to finance anything, no matter what. That hefty restriction curtailed some of the simpler ways to get a bookshop going.
    Crazy schemes have never been a weak point for us, and blood is thicker than printer’s ink. Time to call my sister.
    Tracy misspent her youth devouring books about Doc Savage and the slave traders of Gor; laying about our shared bedroom, those paperback covers were … interesting. Four years Tracy’s junior, I read behind her in a fog of stubborn precociousness until finally assigning science fiction to the same category as coffee—one of those weird things adults liked.
    Now those unappealing reads had turned into precious commodities, and I needed my big sister’s help. More specifically, I needed her books. Some might consider it a bad sign that I had to call my mother to get Tracy’s phone number, but please don’t misinterpret or misunderstand: my sister and I are friends but tend not to keep close tabs on each other. After all, isn’t that what Thanksgiving is for?
    “Hi, Tracy. How’s it going?”
    “Is everything okay?”
    “Sure, sure. Why shouldn’t it be?”
    “You never call me unless you need something. When you moved to that back-of-beyond place you live in now, you didn’t even send me a change of address card.”
    Accurate, she was.
    “Well, you know, we’re there for each other when it counts. Right?”
    Tracy sighed. “How much?”
    Ouch.
    She continued, “The last time you said something like that, you had broken your arm and needed a loan for the emergency room visit.”
    “Hey, I was twenty-two then! I’m older and more financially responsible now.”
    “Hunh. Mom says your latest harebrained scheme is that you talked Jack into buying some drafty old house and you’re trying to start a used book store with no money.”
    “Exactly. I’m now a responsible business owner in the community. So I was just wondering—”
    She interrupted. “When we moved house this spring, I boxed up all our spare books for you and will bring them down at Thanksgiving. Dennis was not all