"Tilly's my sister," Dessa said. "She's nine. She's got epilepsy."
Pinckney Prioleau shifted in the rocking chair. Toomer saw it. She did not look at him.
The seizures had started when Tilly was six, Dessa said. The big kind, the falling-down kind, the kind where her whole body went stiff and then shook, and her eyes went up, and her lips went blue, and afterward she slept for three hours and woke up not knowing what day it was. The doctor at MUSC put her on phenobarbital and that helped, some, and then Dilantin, and that helped some more, but not all the way. She had one or two a month. Sometimes more if she was sick or didn't sleep. Their mama worked as a nurse's aide at a nursing home in Mount Pleasant, the night shift, because it paid an extra forty cents an hour, and so most nights it was Dessa and Tilly in the house, and Bosun.
"The first time he did it," Dessa said, "I was in the kitchen. And I heard him bark. He never barked. And I come out, and Tilly's on the floor in the front room having one, and he's lying right up against her back, holding her. Like that." She put her hand on the dog's back. "Holding her so she don't roll. And barking at me. One time, then wait, then one time. Like he's saying, come here. Come here."
Nobody had taught him that, she said. He just did it. Every time. Some nights she'd hear him bark from the bedroom and run in and Tilly would be in a seizure in her sleep, and Dessa would never have known. So Dessa went to the library in Mount Pleasant and found a book about training dogs for blind people, which was the only book they had about dogs that had jobs, and she read it twice, and then she taught him the bag.
"The bag," said Adelaide Prioleau. It was the first thing she had said since they sat down.
"Yes ma'am. Tilly's bag." Dessa reached over and touched it. "It's got her medicine in it, and a towel to put under her head, and a juice for after, and clean clothes. Sometimes she wets herself, when she has one. She's nine. She hates it if anybody sees. And there's a card. I wrote it. It says her name and her doctor and what to do, so if she has one out somewhere and I'm not there, whoever finds her knows not to put a spoon in her mouth, because people still do that, they think you're supposed to, and it breaks your teeth. The rule was, the bag goes everywhere Tilly goes. School. Church. Her friend's house. And it hangs on a nail by her bed at night. And when she has one, Bosun goes and gets it. He gets the bag and brings it to her and lies down by her and barks for me." She looked at the dog. "I taught him with a bag of my own first, and hot dogs. It took me all of one summer. But he got it. He got it better than me."
"And today," said Toomer, "you walked in with the bag."
"I had to," Dessa said. "My book bag washed away in the storm. This was the only one we had left, because it went with Tilly. And Tilly's got a new one now, from the Red Cross, a blue one. It's not pink. She's mad about that." She almost smiled. "So I've been carrying this one to school. I didn't think. I didn't think about it at all. I thought he was dead."