Page 28 of Her Wicker Guardian

His gaze moves from speaker to speaker. When Shannon uses a word he doesn’t seem to understand, he looks back at me. He may understand enough to know we’re deciding things about him without having enough words to tell us what he wants. The thought sits badly with me.

“I can stay,” Shannon says. “Until you get home.”

“All day?”

“My husband and teenagers can survive one Saturday without me. If something comes up that I can’t figure out, I’ll call you or Laura.”

Laura nods. “My weekend is alarmingly free unless you count laundry and avoiding the grocery store.”

That should settle it. Instead, my attention goes to the man standing near the workshop with one hand against the doorframe. I trust Shannon. He’s the part I don’t know well enough yet. And even so, I don’t want him learning that I’m the only person he can rely on.

My fingers tighten around the mug before I realize how hard I’m holding it. This isn’t a decision about who babysits a problem. He opened his own door last night. He drank when he was thirsty. We can’t start treating him as though he has no say just because he doesn’t have enough words yet.

“Okay,” I say at last.

Shannon doesn’t comment on the delay. She unzips the duffel and pulls out an old iPad. “My kids have newer iPads. It’s a wonder I found this one at the bottom of a drawer. I downloaded basic picture education stuff. If we’re going to be here together for hours, we might as well give him more ways to tell me what he wants.”

That makes the plan feel better. Not perfect. Better.

Then she turns to the duffel. “Clothes?”

I nod, and she lays a pair of Tom’s sweatpants and a soft T-shirt on the folding table rather than carrying them to him.

He watches. Shannon points to him, then the clothes, then him again, and steps away. For a while nothing happens. Then he approaches.

He touches the sweatpants first, compressing the fabric between his fingers before letting it spring back. His gaze moves from the pants to the sweatshirt tied around his hips, then to me. I’m apparently still the nearest available instruction manual.

I point toward the sweatpants and mime pulling something up my legs. Blair makes a small choking noise behind her coffee.

I don’t look at her. “Don’t.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“Continue that excellent work.”

He sits on the edge of a patio chair and works his way through the problem. One leg goes in, then the other. He stands and pulls the pants into place beneath the sweatshirt. He and Tom are close enough in height that they fit, which removes one surreal problem from the list.

Without prompting, he unties the arms of the sweatshirt from around his waist and hands it back to me.

Shannon pushes the T-shirt toward the far side of the table, still leaving the decision to him. He picks it up and studies the opening.

This takes longer. He watches Shannon tug lightly at the collar of her own shirt, looks back at the one in his hands, and tries. His head goes through the correct hole. One arm follows.

The second catches because the fabric snags against a small branchlike projection near his ribs. He works it free and pulls the shirt into place.

For the first time, the borrowed clothes make him look less like something we found in the yard and more like a man standing in it.

Then his hand returns to the place where the fabric caught. His fingers brush sideways over a tightly crossed section of willow.

The sound that comes out of him is so strange that every woman in the yard goes silent. It isn’t his voice. A low wooden resonance moves through his torso, followed by a shorter, breathier note as his fingers cross the same place again.

The resonance resolves into something almost like a word. Lock.

“What was that?” Shannon asks.

He has stopped too. He looks down and brushes his fingertips over the tightly woven section once more.

Lock.