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Tom’s answer is muffled by wicker.
Locke is on the opposite side from me, one hand braced beneath the bear’s enormous woven belly. He’s doing most of the actual lifting while the rest of us provide what Shannon insists on calling “directional support.”
“Left,” she says.
Tom grunts. “Whose left?”
“Mine.”
“That’s not useful.”
“It would be if everyone were oriented correctly.”
Locke looks around the bear at me. “Are we moving it left?”
“No one knows.”
“I know,” Shannon says.
“No, you don’t,” Tom and I say together.
That breaks something in the group. Blair nearly sloshes wine over the rim of her cup. Even Laura bends forward, one hand over her mouth, while Janet quietly steps in where the rest of us have become useless and starts pushing. Locke watches us for a second with the expression he gets when humans are behaving irrationally but he has decided he likes us anyway.
Not even two weeks ago, he was standing in my yard trying to understand why Shannon made an impressed noise over a broken branch. Now he’s in the middle of us while Tom complains about his back and Shannon issues instructions nobody intends to follow.
“Ready?” Locke asks.
Tom braces himself. “Yes.”
Locke lifts, and the rest of us pretend we’re contributing. A minute later, the bear is upright on the platform, and we all step back to admire it.
For all the chaos involved in getting it here, the bear itself is magnificent. Tom helped Locke with the heavier structural work, but everything that gives it character is Locke’s: the broad head, the slightly tilted ears, the massive shoulders narrowing into powerful legs. Even the direction of the weave makes it look as though there might be muscle underneath.
It looks alive.
Not alive the way Locke is. Nothing in me mistakes the two. But the willow has movement in it now, a sense that the bear might step down from the platform if everyone looked away at the same time.
Locke comes to stand beside me. He studies the bear with the critical attention of someone who can still see every place he would change. All I can see is how good he is at this. Looking at his work, it’s easy to forget how recently he came alive. There’s nothing tentative about what his hands can do.
“You’re frowning,” I say.
“The left ear.”
“What about it?”
“It should angle forward more.”
“It looks like a bear.”
“It could look more like a bear.”
“That sentence is the reason artists are exhausting.”
He glances at me. “I’m an artist?”I hadn’t realized he didn’t already think of himself that way. “Yeah. I think you are.”
His attention returns to the sculpture, but he looks at it differently now.
Behind us, Shannon lifts her cup. “To respectable community art.”
