Senseless Acts of Beauty by Lisa Verge Higgins Page A

breathed it all in for a minute, the mildew of the old wood, the faint scent of her grandfather’s pipe tobacco, the aroma of oil and rust, the perfume of a half century of a well-lived life.
    Tess’s whistle pierced the hush. “He was a bit of a pack rat, old Bud, huh?”
    “He’d say he was a ‘collector of American art.’” Riley picked her way between the lawnmower and a pile of inflatable rafts to an area covered by a canvas painter’s tarp. “Grandma wouldn’t let him put any of these in the house, but that didn’t stop him from buying them.”
    She lifted one end of the tarp and Tess took the other end. Dust billowed in a shaft of light flowing in from a high window. They rolled the canvas back until it collapsed into a heap on the floor.
    Riley saw Tess take a sudden breath and then walk over the tarp to stride among the carved wooden bears, the five-foot-tall ones as well as the smaller foot-and-a-half baby bears that nestled up against the larger ones.
    Tess flattened a palm over the surface of the largest sculpture. “I can’t believe you still have the bears.”
    “Teddy’s looking good for his age, don’t you think?” Riley knocked on the shoulder of the one closest to her. “Winnie’s over here.”
    Tess said, “Do you remember when—”
    “Absolutely.”
    “—we dressed them in cheap beads and old hats and whatever we could find in Mary’s old trunk in the attic—”
    “It was raining that day, and we had to push them away from the corner of the barn where it was leaking—”
    “—we held a wedding ceremony for Winnie and Teddy—”
    “—and we stole one of Bud’s shirts and tried to tape a pipe on Teddy’s mouth but it kept falling—”
    “—and we jumped every time it hit the ground.” Tess made a little sound deep in her throat. “I thought your grandmother was going to kill us when she came in to see what we were up to.”
    “She was just furious that her clothes fit Winnie.”
    “Bud was standing right behind her, and he couldn’t stop laughing.”
    Tess covered her mouth, and Riley realized that Tess was hiding a smile, maybe the first smile Riley had seen on her face since she’d arrived. She wished Tess would drop her hand. Just the way Tess’s eyes crinkled made Riley think of young Theresa—not the brooding girl in her eighth grade class who liked to carve the wooden desks with her penknife, or the sullen runaway her grandparents had taken in the second time, but the imaginative younger playmate who’d been a lot more fun than Riley’s cousins and most of the summer visitors.
    When Tess dropped her hand, the smile had faded to a twitch. “I haven’t thought of these bears in years. I see they’ve been breeding.”
    “Grandpa never stopped collecting. He found a chainsaw artist from Saratoga and bought a bunch from him. Others were gifts from some of his friends, his guests, or pieces he picked up at county fairs or roadside stands.”
    When she was little her grandfather used to tell her stories about them. He said they were originally local black bears who’d been frozen into place because of a woodland witch, and once a month, when the light of the full moon fell upon them from the window above, they twirled into life.
    How many hours had Riley spent staring out one of the windows, watching the barn through the trees in the hope of seeing the doors open and the wooden bears sneak out to dance by the light of the moon?
    Then Riley heard herself say, “I have to sell all of them.”
    The words dropped like lead in the silence. Riley felt Tess’s sudden attention.
    “I figure that I could get a good price if I sell them as a set. Maybe it’d pay for a plumbing upgrade or new roofs on the cabins.”
    “Things are that bad?”
    Riley ran her finger down a furrow of fur on Teddy’s belly, debating how much she should say about her shrinking bank account, the dearth of summer reservations, the struggle to get a business loan, and every other