"Bosun," she said. "Oh, Bosun. She's not here, baby. She's not here."
And she slid down the glass door until she was sitting on the floor, and put both arms around the dog's neck, and put her face into the fur behind his ear, and the dog turned his head and licked her ear and her jaw and her eye and then began, for the first time since the fourth of October, to cry like any other dog in the building, high and wild and unashamed, while the girl held on to him, and the old pink backpack lay on the floor beside them with its little purple-haired pony face down on the linoleum and the name on the front flap, in puffy paint, where everybody could read it.
TILLY.
It took them twenty minutes to get everybody into Toomer's office, and when they got there it was too small for them, the way it was too small for everything that fall. Toomer sat behind her desk because it was the only place left to sit. The Prioleaus took the two chairs across from her, the one with the split vinyl seat and the one that rocked, and Pinckney Prioleau sat in the one that rocked and did not seem to notice. Cassius stood in the doorway with a wet paper towel wrapped around the rope burn on his hand. Major, the old hound, had heaved himself up off his blanket in the corner when the strange dog came in and then, after one look, lain back down again with a groan, the way he did with anything he had decided was not his business.
Dessa Gadsden sat on the floor. Nobody told her to. She sat with her back against the filing cabinet and the dog lay across her legs, all seventy-two pounds of him, with his head on her arm, and every few seconds he lifted his head and looked at the pink backpack, which she had put on the floor beside her, and then looked at the door, and then put his head back down. He was not crying any more. He was breathing hard, through his mouth, the way dogs breathe at the vet.
"I'm sorry," Dessa said. "I'm sorry, Mrs. Toomer. I didn't know he was here. I swear I didn't know."
"Nobody's saying you did," Toomer said. "Start at the start."
So she did. Toomer would remember afterward that she told it the way people in the Lowcountry told things that had happened to them, plainly, without hurrying, with the worst parts set down in the same voice as the rest so that you did not hear them coming until they were already in the room.
They had lived in McClellanville, she said, on the back side of Jeremy Creek, in a house her granddaddy had built on block piers in 1948. Her daddy had been a shrimper, Lucius Gadsden, on a boat called the Miss Viola after her mama. He died in the spring of 1987, on the boat, in the middle of a drag, of a heart attack, forty-four years old, and the man who worked for him brought him in. Bosun had been her daddy's dog. Her daddy got him as a puppy off a man in Georgetown in 1984 and named him Bosun because every boat needed one, and he went out on the Miss Viola most mornings, standing in the bow with his ears blowing back. After her daddy died he would not go near the dock. He moved into the house. He picked Tilly.