"Pinckney says the contract is signed and the mother has given him up, and the child's family can't keep him, and that I have as much right as anyone and more need than most, and that he would rather be thought a hard old man by a stranger than leave me alone on a kitchen floor. And all of that is true." She turned and looked at Toomer directly. "And then he goes into his study and shuts the door, and I hear him in there. And I know that he saw that child's picture too."
Toomer sat with the teacup on her knee. She thought about Lanier Fontaine and his three hundred dogs. She thought about Viola Gadsden on one knee by the ice machine with a wet patch on her uniform. She thought about the TATTOO Y/N line, and the N, and the eleven dogs behind him in the hall.
"I don't know what you should do, Mrs. Prioleau," she said finally. "I'm sorry. I came down here thinking I might, and I don't. I can tell you what the law says, and what my board says, and they say the same thing, and it's on your side. I can tell you the mother says she can't take him. And I can tell you I've never seen a dog look for anybody the way he looked for that child on Friday."
"Then I'd like to meet her," said Adelaide Prioleau. "The little girl. Tilly. Before anybody decides anything. I'd like to see them together, the two of them, just once. Can you arrange that?" She paused. "I know I have no right to ask the mother anything. But would you?"
Toomer called the Palmetto Motor Lodge from the payphone outside the Gulf station on Calhoun Street. The man at the desk said he'd go knock. She waited, with a dime ready, watching a National Guard truck go by with its back full of chainsaws. When Viola Gadsden came on the line she sounded tired past tired. Toomer told her what Adelaide Prioleau had asked. She did not tell her the rest. That was not hers to tell.
There was a long silence on the line.
"Tilly asked me last night," Viola said at last, "why the dog didn't come home if he was alive. Why he didn't walk home. And I told her he did try. I told her they found him walking up 17, walking north. Walking toward McClellanville. And she said, Then he was coming home, Mama, and there wasn't any home to come to." Her voice went flat and careful. "All right. Monday. I'm off Monday. Four o'clock. But I'm not promising that lady anything."
"Nobody's asking you to."