Free The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap by Wendy Welch Page B

granted.
    Dubbed Bob the Mad Irishman the minute we met him, he became one of our favorite customers, a fortysomething sweetheart of a guy without the sense God invested in geese. Bob moved here from further south, looking for handyman work. He considered himself the poet laureate of Ireland. The fact that he was neither a published poet nor from Ireland interfered not one iota with this confident self-knowledge.
    Jack and I admire those who don’t let reality get in their way, so we had a lot of time for Bob. This proved fortunate, because his poems were long and he read us one each time he stopped in. Every visit, Bob brought me a plastic rose from the dollar store. Black hair flopping into crystalline blue eyes, he smiled a crooked smile that showed the dimples in his rugged jawline as he tried to entice my husband to partake from the vodka flask he carried in his pickup. They often sat on the porch together, smoking. It became a ritual: the rose, the flask refusal by me and acceptance by Jack, the poem.
    Bob arrived once with a lady in tow, a nice woman I enjoyed meeting. On first glance, she was not a person one expected someone as pretty as Bob to be with. Round and gray, she looked as if she’d experienced a lot of life. She had a cheerful, lined face and discerning eyes. He introduced her as his “assistant.” She let that go until he went out on the porch for a cigarette, then set the record straight.
    “I let him stay in my spare room. He showed up at the library where I work, looking to get a card, and he couldn’t answer any of the questions. No fixed address. No employer. He looked like his dog died. So sad, like a little boy. What the hey, I took him home. Gotta live a little.”
    She’d gotten the story off him: the girl he adored had taken his diamond and his heart, but the rest of what Bob’s lady love needed, she acquired through snorting stuff up her nose. Apparently she inhaled most of his fortune before Bob gave up and left her—and the state.
    “I know what he is,” the free-spirited librarian said, “but I feel sorry for him and I like the company.” So Bob was a kept man.
    Besides the roses, sometimes he brought books, but never for credit. Bob wasn’t that kind of guy. He said they were gifts for us, given to him by places where he worked on repairs. My personal favorite was the 1890s illustrated book club edition of The Three Musketeers : worthless but beautiful, if you catch my drift. But when Bob wanted to own anything from our bookstore, he’d throw fifty-dollar bills on the counter and say, “Let me know when that’s used up.” It was his way.
    Bob must have been coming to the shop the better part of a year when he brought us four titles he had “picked up working on a house.” Among them rested an old Agatha Christie, spine broken almost in half. Jack was away, so we sat on the porch, Bob chain-smoking and taking nips from his flask while I drank a cup of tea.
    “I’m having a hard time making ends meet.” Bob eyed the smoke ring he’d just made. “The jobs are scattered and my classes are dull, plus I miss a lot while I’m working.” Retraining at the community college to enhance his handyman-ing, he’d complained before that he couldn’t do both work and school with any modicum of success. “I’m thinking of heading back home, but…” He shrugged.
    He’d been talking like this a while. I smiled and said he should do what seemed best for him. He read me his latest poem—about Queen Mab’s broken dream of love—and we parted.
    Months passed and Bob did not reappear, so we figured he went back to his home state to start over. Of course he left no means to get in touch with him. I hadn’t even gotten the name or branch of the librarian. His Agatha Christie, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, sat around a while. He’d always say, “These are gifts for you and Jack, not for the shop,” so we usually took his stuff upstairs. I’d put his Three Musketeers in the