Viola Gadsden stood up. She brushed off the knee of her uniform. Then she looked at Toomer.
"Mrs. Toomer," she said. "I got to go. I'll think. That's all I can tell you. I'll think."
Toomer took a card out of her shirt pocket and wrote on the back of it, and handed it over. "That's the shelter. And that's my home number, under it, though I'm hardly ever there. Whatever you decide." She hesitated. "Mrs. Gadsden, the lady downtown. The one who wants him. I don't think she's what you think she is."
"They never are," said Viola Gadsden. "That don't make them any less what they are." But she put the card in the breast pocket of her uniform, and buttoned the pocket over it, and went to her sister's car, a long green Pontiac with a cracked dash, and drove away down Rivers Avenue toward the bridge.
Adelaide Prioleau called the shelter herself on Saturday afternoon. Toomer was out in the warehouse and Cassius took the message on the pad by the phone in his careful block capitals: MRS PRIOLEAU. WOULD MRS TOOMER COME TO TEA SUNDAY 3 PM. 41 TRADD. SHE SAYS PLEASE COME ALONE. Under it, after a space, he had written, in smaller letters, SHE SOUNDED LIKE SOMEBODY GOING TO THE DOCTOR.
So on Sunday Toomer put on the only good skirt she had that had not been in the cattery since the storm and drove downtown.
The peninsula was still a mess. You forgot, out on Leeds Avenue, how bad it had been, and then you came down Meeting Street and remembered. There were blue roofing tarps on every third house, tied down over the slate with clothesline, and live oaks lay on their sides in the yards with their roots up in the air, root balls as big as cars, holding up whole clods of earth like a fist that had come up out of the ground.
Number forty-one was a single house, the Charleston kind, narrow end to the street, with two tiers of piazza running down the side. The front wall of the garden was brick, eight feet high, with a wooden gate, and there was a tarp on the back slope of the roof and a broken magnolia lying over the rear wall, just as Mrs. Huger had said. Pinckney Prioleau opened the gate himself. He was in shirtsleeves. He looked older than he had on Friday.