"I knew it was him the minute she said what he did." Viola looked down at the parking lot. "That's what he does. That's what he did every time. I wasn't there, most times. I was at work. But I'd come in at seven in the morning and Dessa would tell me, and there'd be the towel on the floor, and the bag open, and him lying on the bed with Tilly. And I'd go to the kitchen and stand at the sink so they wouldn't see me." She stopped. "You think I don't know what that dog is? I know what that dog is. That dog is the reason I could go to work at night. That dog is the reason I didn't lose my job when Lucius died. That dog is the reason my oldest child got any sleep at all for three years."
"Then why—"
"Look at this place." Viola did not raise her voice. She swept one hand out, at the motel, the parking lot, the bent palm tree, the traffic on Rivers. "Look at it. You see a dog in it? Man in the office says no pets, no exceptions, I put a dog in that room and we're out by noon, and he means it, there's ten families on his list waiting for that room. The Red Cross voucher's good till the tenth of November. After that I don't know. We're on a list for a FEMA trailer, but you got to have a lot to put it on, and our lot's got somebody else's house sitting on it right now and a shrimp boat in the marsh behind. I make four dollars and ten cents an hour. My girls are sleeping in one bed." She took a breath. "So I'm going to go get my dog out of the pound, and bring him here, and get put out, and then where? In the car? In my sister's car? And then when we have to give him up again, in a month, in two months, when somebody says no dogs, I'm going to watch Tilly lose him twice?"
Toomer said nothing.
"I left my children that night," Viola Gadsden said. "You understand me? The night of the storm. I was in Mount Pleasant turning old people over in their beds so they wouldn't get sores, other people's mamas and daddies, while my girls were standing in water up to their necks at Lincoln High School. I didn't know till the next afternoon if they were alive. I didn't know for a day and a half. Dessa had to leave him because of me. Because I wasn't there." She looked straight at Toomer then. "And I am not going to do one more thing to those girls that I can't take back. If there's a lady downtown with a big house and a wall around it who wants that dog, and she's going to put him in a basket by her bed like Dessa says, then I thank God for her. And Tilly will get over it, because she's nine, and nine-year-olds get over things. And Dessa won't, but Dessa's going to have to get over a lot of things."
"Mrs. Gadsden," Toomer said. "Does Tilly know he's alive?"
Viola Gadsden's face changed.
Behind them the door of room fourteen opened the rest of the way. The child was standing in it in her Smurfs shirt, barefoot on the concrete, with the Styrofoam cup in one hand. She was small for nine. She had a scar through one eyebrow, white against her brown skin, where something had cut it once when she fell, and her hair was in four short braids with plastic barrettes on the ends, two yellow, two green.
"Mama," she said. "Is it Bosun? Is she talking about Bosun?"