She got it out. She held it out to him, the white copy and the yellow. He did not tear it up, which was what she had half expected. He took the pen off the counter and wrote across the face of both copies, in his slanted beautiful hand, VOIDED AT THE REQUEST OF THE ADOPTERS. P. & A. PRIOLEAU, 30 OCT 1989, and signed it, and his wife signed it under him, and he handed it back.
"So it's explicable at the meeting," he said. "Lanier will want that."
Viola Gadsden was still on the floor. She looked up at all of them. Her face had closed up again, the way it had by the ice machine.
"I thank you," she said. "I do. But I still got a room at the Palmetto Motor Lodge with no pets, no exceptions. That didn't change because she had a fit on your floor."
"No," said Pinckney Prioleau. "It didn't." He took a card out of his breast pocket. "The Palmetto Motor Lodge belongs to a man named Charlie Lockwood, whose daddy I kept out of a great deal of trouble in 1962. I imagine he will make an exception for a working dog if I ask him to, and I'd like to ask him. With your permission, Mrs. Gadsden. Not without it." He held the card out. She did not take it. He went on holding it. "And I'd like to see your homeowner's policy, if you'll let me. Flood is not wind. That's what they told you, isn't it. But it matters very much which one came first, and whether the house came off its piers before the water reached it or after, and I spent thirty-five years making insurance companies explain which came first. I'm not offering you charity. I am retired, and I'm bored, and I am angry at the insurance company already on principle."
Viola Gadsden looked at the card for a long time.
"I can't pay you," she said.
"I would be insulted," said Pinckney Prioleau, "if you tried."