On the eighteenth of October, Toomer took him off the hold and put him on the adoption row with a card on his run that said SUNNY in Magic Marker, because somebody had to name him, and because she thought a name like that might help. She had been running the shelter for fourteen years and she knew what helped. She knew that people walked past black dogs and old dogs and dogs that barked, and that they stopped for goldens. She was not proud of knowing it.
The Prioleaus stopped on the twentieth.
Toomer had not been there for the first visit. She had been out on Leeds Avenue with a veterinarian from Columbia trying to decide what to do about a parvo outbreak in the warehouse, and it was Cassius who told her about it afterward, in the parking lot, while she was hosing out the back of the van. A couple from downtown, he said. South of Broad. Older people. Nice manners. They walked the whole row twice and then the woman stopped at Sunny's run and stood there, and Sunny got up and came to the gate, and then the woman asked could she go in.
"And?"
"And she went in." Cassius took his cap off and turned it in his hands. "She sat down on the floor. In a skirt. Right there on the concrete. And that dog lay down beside her and put his head in her lap, and the husband stood outside the gate with his hands in his pockets about twenty minutes and didn't say one word."
"Did they put in an application?"
"No ma'am. They left. But she wrote his number down."
They came back on the twenty-fourth, a Tuesday. That time Toomer was there. She came out of her office and introduced herself, and Pinckney Prioleau shook her hand, firmly, once, and said, "Mrs. Toomer. I believe you knew my brother Cotesworth, at the Navy Yard." She had, slightly, a long time ago, when her husband was alive and still working there. That was Charleston. His wife was Adelaide, and she was smaller than he was by a foot, with white hair cut short and very straight posture and a linen dress the color of oyster shells. She had a way of standing still that Toomer noticed. Adelaide Prioleau stood as if she had been told once, a long time ago, that if she held perfectly still nobody would look at her, and had believed it.
Toomer gave them the visiting room, which was a converted storage closet with two plastic chairs and a rag rug. Cassius brought Sunny. And then Toomer went back to her office, because the phone was ringing, and when she came out again twenty-five minutes later Pinckney Prioleau was standing in the hall outside the visiting room with his back to the wall and his face gray, and through the little wire-glass window in the door she could see his wife sitting on the rag rug with her back against one of the plastic chairs and the dog lying full length against her, his spine along her hip, his head across her knees.