Page 177 of Her Wicker Guardian

I stretch, lie here another minute because I can, then pull on a robe and head downstairs.

The cottage is quiet. The screen door is open, and through it I can see Locke outside by the workshop.

He’s standing beside a willow garden arch nearly as tall as he is, checking one of the curved joins near the top. He built it for a woman who lives three streets over from Mrs. Calhoun and has spent the last two weeks changing her mind about whether she wants roses or clematis climbing it.

The bear was his first big public piece, and Hollis Springs has more or less adopted it. The town made it permanent after the festival, and now it stands beside one of the ENTERING HOLLIS SPRINGS, MISSOURI signs. Every time we drive past it, Locke looks. Every single time. If I mention it, he suddenly becomes very interested in the road ahead.

I step outside.

Locke looks up and smiles. “Good morning.”

“Morning.”

The willow across his chest has changed since autumn. The repair from the festival disappeared into the rest of him months ago, leaving no obvious boundary between the damaged willow and the growth that replaced it. The wedding ring is still somewhere inside the dense weave at the center of his chest, completely hidden from view.

“You slept late,” he says.

“I did.”

The workshop beyond him has changed completely since those first days, when the half-finished bear dominated the yard nearby. Bundles of willow are stacked beneath the overhang according to thickness and flexibility. Locke’s tools hang where he can reach them. Half of a wicker fox stands on one worktable, its narrow face unfinished, while the beginnings of a pair of enormous wings occupy another.

The wings aren’t a commission. He started them because he wanted to see whether he could make them look as though they might actually lift something off the ground.

The first thing he made that nobody had asked for was the flamingo he started the day of Mara’s interview. It stands beside my garden now, one long willow leg planted in the dirt and its ridiculous curved neck angled toward the cottage.

A month later he started another one. I told him very firmly that one wicker flamingo was enough for any reasonable yard. Apparently that translated to one per birthday, because he has already informed me there will eventually be a flock.

I’m pretending to object.

“I’m making coffee,” I say.

He follows me inside and takes the last piece of apple pie from the refrigerator, which reminds me how strange eating turned out to be for him.

Food is entirely optional. Locke doesn’t digest it the way I do, and there is no human-style aftermath. Whatever he eats seems to be absorbed through the living weave as nutrients, almost like fertilizer. We discovered that after a festival weekend involving far too much fried food, when he woke the next morning with enough fresh green shoots along his shoulders that we had to trim them before he could put on a shirt. Now eating is mostly pleasure, with occasional landscaping consequences.

The book he was reading last night is still open on the kitchen table, face-down beside a pencil and a sheet of paper covered in words he copied out to practice later. He’s worked his way up to books written for about a third-grade reader now, which delights him and infuriates him in roughly equal measure. He can get through most of a children’s chapter book on his own, but every few pages he finds a word English has apparently designed solely to offend him.

Yesterday’s was knight. The silent K did not go over well.

Morning light catches the little table beside the front window, and the red glass gleams against the white wall. The lamp is still there, its ruby-red base every bit as ridiculous as the day I bought it. It has company now: a red glass vase Locke brought home from Calhoun’s, a heavy ruby paperweight from an antique shop, and a tiny glass bird he bought because, according to him, “It looked like something you would choose.”

My questionable taste in red has become something he actively encourages.

Locke’s phone buzzes on the little table beside the door.

He picks it up and reads the message, slower than I would but without needing help.

“Shannon has a customer who wants a peacock.”

I laugh. “Naturally she does.”

“I didn’t ask her to find customers.”

“She remains unclear on that part.”

Locke reads the message again. “A peacock would be interesting.”

“And now you want to make one.”