"He was right about both," she said. "That's what took me so long to understand. People forget, now. They forget what it was. There were laws, when I was a girl. In some states you couldn't marry. There were people sterilized for it, in this country, in places that called themselves hospitals. So he kept me. He got me the phenobarbital and he got me the bromides, and he told the school I had a weak heart, and he told everybody else nothing. And I learned how to stand very still, so nobody would look at me."
She told Pinckney in 1946, she said, a month before the wedding. She told him in this garden, on this bench. She had been sure he would break it off.
"And he said, Is that all? Like that. Is that all, Addie? I thought you were going to tell me you were a Methodist." She almost laughed. "He's been my keeper for forty-three years. That's not a nice word, but it's the true one. We have no children. We decided not to, because no one could tell us then whether I would pass it down, and because I was afraid of having one in my arms when I fell. We go nowhere he can't go too. I haven't driven a car since 1971, when I had a spell at the wheel on the Ashley River bridge, and by the grace of God I only went into the rail. The medicines are better now. I have the big ones very seldom. But I have what Dr. Legare calls complex partials, little ones, three or four a month, where I go away and come back and I'm standing in the kitchen holding a fork and I don't know how long it's been. And for forty-three years, when I've come back, it has been to Pinckney. Or it has been to nobody." She looked at Toomer. "Mostly it has been to nobody. He can't watch me every minute. Nobody can."
"Mrs. Prioleau," Toomer said. "On Tuesday. In the visiting room."
"Yes." Adelaide Prioleau set her cup down. "I had one. Not a big one. I felt it coming, the way I sometimes do, a smell like hot pennies, and I tried to get down on the floor before it took me, the way you learn to, and I don't remember anything after that. And when I came back, Mrs. Toomer, I was lying on that rug with my head against the chair, and that dog was lying against my back. All along my back, holding me. With his head across my legs so I couldn't get up too fast. And he was looking at the door, and barking. Once, and waiting, and once. Calling somebody." She stopped. Her voice did not shake, but it went very quiet. "I am sixty-eight years old, and I have had perhaps two thousand seizures in my life, and that was the first time I ever came back from one and something was holding on to me."
The chainsaw out on the street stopped. In the quiet Toomer could hear water dripping from the broken magnolia into the fountain.
"I didn't know why he did it," Adelaide said. "On Friday I found out. He wasn't doing it for me. He was doing it for that little girl. He thought I was her. Or he thought I was somebody he was supposed to do it for, because he didn't have her anymore." She folded her hands. "And Pinckney had a heart attack in August, Mrs. Toomer. A small one. They tell him it was small. He's seventy-two. He came home from Roper and he sat in his study for two days, and then he came out and said, Addie, I want you to have a dog. A real one. One that will be here. And I knew what he meant. He meant, for after. He has spent forty-three years making sure I'm never alone when I come back, and he is frightened to death that he's going to go first." She looked out at the wrecked garden. "So you see, it wasn't a whim. We didn't drive out to the pound on a Friday afternoon because a rich lady wanted a pretty dog to match the drawing room. I wanted that dog more than I've wanted anything since I was a girl. And on Friday I found out I wanted him because somebody else had taught him how to love me."
"What does your husband say?"