Dessa looked up at her. "No ma'am," she said. "She just wakes up and she's on the floor and he's there. She says that's how she knows it happened. She wakes up, and he's there."
Adelaide Prioleau nodded. She did not say anything else. She put the red leash down on the corner of Toomer's desk, very neatly, coiled, with the store tag still on it, and she went out, and her husband went after her, and through the window Toomer watched them go down the shell drive to the champagne Mercedes with the crack in its windshield. He opened her door for her. She did not get in. She stood with one hand on the top of the door, looking back at the building, for a long time, until he said something to her and she did.
Dessa took the six-fifteen bus back up Rivers Avenue without the dog. There was no other way to do it, and she knew that before Toomer said it. She sat on the floor of the office until the last possible minute, with her face in his neck, talking to him so low that nobody else could hear the words, and then she stood up and told him to stay, and he stayed. He did not try to follow her. That was the worst of it, Cassius said later. Any other dog in the building would have gone through the door after her. Bosun just lay down where she had been sitting, with his nose against the bottom of the filing cabinet where it still smelled of her, and watched the door, the way he had watched the door of his run for three weeks.
She left the pink backpack. Toomer hung it on the hook on the back of the office door, next to her raincoat, because the dog would not settle until she did, and once it was hanging there he looked at it, and looked at her, and put his head down on his paws.
He did not eat that night. Toomer stayed. She would have stayed anyway. She sat at her desk with a cup of Sanka and the stack of cut-out classifieds under the conch shell and went through them again, one by one, with a pencil, not looking for anything, just reading them. LOST Hugo night, black chow mix, Folly Rd, answers to Bear, my son is 6. LOST our dog Lady, part shepherd, we have looked everywhere, we are at the Red Cross on Remount Rd, if anyone has her we just want to know she is alive.
At a quarter past nine the phone rang, and it was Lanier Fontaine, the chairman of the board, a fair-minded Mount Pleasant dentist who did not usually call her at night.
"Marguerite," he said then. "Pinckney Prioleau called me at home tonight."
Toomer closed her eyes. "Did he."
"He did. And I want to tell you what he said, because it surprised me. He said there was a complication with the dog, and a family that had lost everything in the storm, and he said he wanted me to know that whatever you decided, the money he gave was given, and it was not his intention to have it hanging over anybody's head. He asked me, as a personal favor, to make sure you knew that." Fontaine paused. "He was very clear about it."