"Is everything all right, Mr. Prioleau?"
"Yes," he said. "Quite all right. My wife felt a little faint. It's the heat in here. She's fine now." He looked at her. He had pale eyes, washed out like old denim, and in them was something Toomer could not read and did not try to. "We'd like the application, please."
She gave it to them. They filled it out at the front counter, in his handwriting, a beautiful slanted handwriting with every loop closed. Two adults in the household. No children at home. A house on Tradd Street with a walled garden. A previous dog, a Boykin spaniel, deceased 1984. A veterinarian in Ravenel Toomer had heard of. A reference who was a retired judge. The home visit was done on Wednesday by a volunteer named Mrs. Huger, who came back and said the house had a tarp on part of the roof and a magnolia down across the back wall but otherwise it was the kind of house you saw on the Christmas tours, and the garden was walled on all four sides, and Mrs. Prioleau had shown her where the dog would sleep, which was in a basket by her side of the bed.
"In the bedroom," Mrs. Huger said. "Not the kitchen. Not the piazza. She was very particular about it."
On Thursday morning Pinckney Prioleau had come in by himself with a check for the adoption fee, forty-five dollars, and a second check, which he had put in a separate envelope and handed to Toomer without saying anything about it. She had opened it after he left. It was made out to the Lowcountry Humane Society Hurricane Relief Fund, and it was for five thousand dollars.
She had sat with it in her office for a long time. It was not a bribe. It was what men like Pinckney Prioleau did when they had been lucky and knew it. But she had sat with it anyway, and turned it over, and she had thought about the people on the phone at seven in the morning, and she had thought about Sunny lying in his run watching the door, and she had not been able to make the two thoughts sit down at the same table.
"You look like you got a toothache," Cassius had said, from her doorway.
"Do you think," Toomer had said, "that there is anything wrong with a rich lady from Tradd Street getting the best dog in this building?"
He had considered it. That was the thing about Cassius. He always considered it.