She took it. She did not say yes. She put it in her pocketbook, and closed the clasp on it, and said, "I'll bring you the policy. I'm not saying anything else today," and he said, "That's more than most of my clients ever said," and she almost smiled, and did not.
Then Dessa Gadsden, who had not said a word since the card came out of the bag, stood up off the floor and wiped her hands on her jeans and looked at Adelaide Prioleau.
"Ma'am," she said. "It took me one summer. With him. A bag and some hot dogs. He already knew the lying-down part on his own, some dogs just do, you have to find one that does it. But the rest I taught him." She swallowed. "If you got a dog that's calm, and smart, and likes you. I could teach him the bag. Your bag. I'd come on Saturdays. You wouldn't have to pay me nothing."
Adelaide Prioleau looked at her. For a moment Toomer thought she was not going to be able to answer at all.
"I would pay you," she said at last. "Three thirty-five an hour, I believe, is the going rate. Pinckney would insist." She looked down at the pink backpack on the floor by the child's head. "My bag would have to be a different color. I'm too old for pink."
"Yes ma'am," said Dessa. "What color?"
"I have no idea," said Adelaide Prioleau. "Nobody has ever asked me."
They went out to the row together, the old woman and the girl, while Viola Gadsden sat on the floor with her daughter in her lap and the dog's head on her knee. Toomer watched them go down the aisle between the runs, slowly, the girl a head taller, stopping at each gate. They walked the row twice. They did not stop at the young dogs or the pretty ones. At the far end, under the window where the light came in yellow through the dust, they stopped at the run of a gray-muzzled black shepherd mix who had come in from Folly Road on the second of October with no name, a big quiet dog who had lain in the back of his run for four weeks while people walked past him. Dessa went in first. She sat down on the concrete and waited, and after a while the black dog got up and came and lay down against her. Then Adelaide Prioleau went in, in her navy skirt, and sat down on the floor beside them.