"No, Addie, it has to be asked, and it is better I ask it than Mrs. Toomer." "There are a great many golden retrievers in South Carolina. This dog came in with no collar and no tags. He has been held the full period required by law, and longer. We have signed a contract. We've paid. My wife has—" He stopped. "My wife has become attached. I don't doubt you lost a dog. I don't doubt you loved him. But a dog that grabs a backpack is a dog that grabs a backpack, and I would be a poor husband if I did not ask whether there was something more than that."
Dessa looked at him for a moment. She did not look angry. She looked, Toomer thought, the way she looked at the warehouse when somebody handed her a hose and pointed at a run that had not been cleaned since the storm: tired, and not surprised, and already starting.
"There's a Polaroid," she said. "In the bag."
She unzipped the front pocket and took out a square of white-bordered film in a sandwich bag and handed it up to Toomer. It had been wet. But you could see a little girl in a pink dress on the front steps of a white house with green shutters, grinning, with a gap where her front teeth should have been, and beside her a golden retriever with his tongue out, and on the dog's back, buckled on with its straps around his chest, the pink backpack. Somebody had written on the bottom border in ballpoint, EASTER 89, TILLY & BOSUN.
Toomer handed it to Pinckney Prioleau. He looked at it for a long time and then handed it to his wife, who held it in both hands and did not look up from it.
"Golden retrievers look alike," he said, but quieter.
"Yes sir. They do." Dessa put her hand on the dog's left hind leg. "So my daddy had him tattooed. In 1985. There was a man came around to the feed store in Mount Pleasant who did it, for the National Dog Registry. You put a number on the dog and they keep it on a list, so if he's stolen they can find you. My daddy used his Social Security number. It's on the inside of his leg, here. Up high, where the hair's thin." She swallowed. "I know it by heart. We had to put it on everything after he died. Two four seven, six two, eight eight one nine."
Toomer looked at Cassius. Cassius came in from the door and knelt down on the floor beside the girl, slowly, one knee and then the other, the way he did everything now, and Dessa said, "Bosun, belly," and the dog rolled onto his side without a fuss, and Cassius lifted the left hind leg and parted the fur on the inside of the thigh with two fingers and bent close and squinted. Then he took his reading glasses out of his shirt pocket and put them on and looked again.
"Mrs. Toomer," he said. "You want to come see this."