She had been in the show ring that morning, June knew; she was still in her white shirt and jeans, though she'd put the pink Kruse's T-shirt on over the top and knotted it. Her face was made up now, mascara and pink lipstick, nothing left of the girl in the barn. Her two friends were with her, and three or four boys this time, high school boys in mesh caps, and a few hangers-on who just liked a show. They came across the concourse in a loose wedge and stopped in front of Dot's, and Shelby put both her hands flat on the counter.
"Still not flying, huh?" she said, loud, for the crowd. "Man. That's a shame. You know, I was thinking. Maybe it's you. Maybe the lemonade's just embarrassed."
Laughter. One of the boys said, "Ooooh."
"Can I help you?" June's mother said, coming forward.
"Yeah, actually. I want a floating lemonade." Shelby slapped a dollar on the counter. "It says right there. Floating. I'm a paying customer. Make it float."
"Shelby," said June's mother, very evenly, "I think you should go back to your father's stand."
"Why? I'm buying. Isn't that what you want? We heard you guys are hurting. Everybody's heard." She turned to her friends and spread her arms wide. "Floating lemonade! Since 1953! Watch it fly! Watch it—" and she brought her hand down on the counter, flat, hard, so that the stack of cups jumped and the cigar box rattled, "—fall flat on its face."
The crowd had grown. It always did, at a fair; people would stop for anything, a dropped corn dog, a crying kid. There must have been thirty of them, forty, a half-circle in front of the stand, and more stopping at the back, craning their necks to see what the fuss was. June saw Bev from Ames, and a farmer in overalls with a little girl on his shoulders. She saw Wendell, behind his cotton candy bowl, his face perfectly blank, his hand resting on his awning pole.
And she saw Shelby's eyes. Close up, they were not mean at all. They were desperate. They were the eyes of somebody who has been told all her life that the only thing you can do with the world is grab it by the throat, and who is very, very tired, and who cannot stop.
June took the ring out of her pocket and slid it onto her thumb, under the counter, where nobody could see.
She had read the line in the notebook a dozen times. It was in her grandmother's capitals, on a page by itself, with a box drawn around it: WHAT YOU SAY WHEN YOU START. ALWAYS. NEVER FORGET. Wendell said Dot had said it ten thousand times, every summer for thirty-two years, to every single person who ever stood where Shelby was standing, and that there had been grown men who drove four hundred miles every August just to hear her say it.
June put her hand on the counter, flat, right next to the trick cup. She looked Shelby Kruse dead in the eye.
"You want it?" she said. Her voice came out higher than she meant. She cleared her throat and said it again. "You want it so bad? Then come take it from me."