By midnight, June could make the cup lift off the counter and travel four feet down the runway and set down again without spilling. Twice in a row. Then she dropped it.
"Good," Wendell said, standing up and stretching. "Now you know you can do it, and you know you can mess it up. That's the whole job."
* * *
They slept those nights in a camper Wendell's nephew had lent them, an old aluminum egg parked in the campground on the east side of the fairgrounds among the hundreds of other campers and tents and pickups with mattresses in the beds. At five-thirty on Sunday morning June woke up with her thumb aching from the ring and couldn't get back to sleep, so she put on her sneakers and walked.
The fair at dawn was a different country. The rides stood still and dripping. The only real life was in the livestock barns: kids in white shirts leading sheep to the wash racks, fans roaring, the deep sweet smell of hay and manure.
June walked into the cattle barn because she missed the farm. She hadn't known how much until she smelled it.
She was halfway down the second aisle, between rows of steers tied to the rails, black and red and roan, their coats brushed up into soft clouds, when she heard Rollie Kruse.
"—don't care what Dale Hendricks said. Dale Hendricks isn't paying for that animal's feed. I am."
June stopped. She was behind a big Simmental with a blue ribbon on its stall card. Through the gap between its shoulder and the rail she could see, three stalls down, a black steer with a white blaze across its face in the shape of a playing card, and beside it, Shelby, in a white show shirt with her number pinned on the back, holding a show stick in both hands like she might need to defend herself with it.
Rollie stood over her with his belt buckle at her eye level. He was wearing a Kruse's Famous cap and his face was red.
"He's not finishing right. You've been babying him all summer and now look. Fourth in his class. Fourth. Know what fourth gets you at the sale? Nothing. Freezer beef." He jerked his chin at the steer. "You want to walk around with your heart hanging out, go ahead. But that's a twelve-hundred-pound steer that cost me eleven hundred dollars, and on Friday he goes through the ring and gets what he gets, and you're going to smile and shake hands with whoever buys him. You hear me?"
"Yes, sir."
"Nobody gives you anything in this life. You understand that? Nobody's going to hand you a thing. You want something, you go and take it. That's the lesson of this whole fair. You think your mother figured that out? She figured it out. She went and took herself to Omaha." He laughed without any humor in it. "Now get him washed. And be at the Grandstand trailer by ten. We're short."