And the cup began to float.
* * *
It went up slow, at first, a quarter-inch, a half-inch, so that for a second nobody understood what they were seeing. The cup was simply not touching the counter anymore. There was daylight underneath it. Then it rose, smooth, steady, the counterweight inside Wendell's pole taking up the line exactly as Linh had said it would, until it hung at the level of Shelby's chin, a plain waxed-paper cup with a yellow lemon on the side, turning very gently in the hot air, the lemonade inside it catching the sun.
The heart lifts. The thumb follows.
June did not look at the line. She looked at the cup like it was a bird she was surprised to see.
The crowd made a sound June had never heard before. It wasn't a gasp, exactly. It was lower than that, a kind of rumble, the sound forty people make when they all stop breathing at once.
Shelby stared at the cup. Her mouth was open. Then, because she was Shelby, because she had been raised to take, she reached for it.
June leaned back on her heels about an inch and lifted her thumb.
The cup slid up and back, away from Shelby's hand, as easy as a leaf on a creek. Shelby's fingers closed on air. She lunged a little, up on her toes, and the cup drifted higher, just out of reach, and hung there, and turned.
Someone in the crowd laughed, and then someone else, and it wasn't the mean laugh. It was the other kind. The kind that comes up out of your chest before you can stop it, when you are six years old and see something you didn't know was possible. The farmer with the little girl on his shoulders was laughing. The little girl was pointing and shrieking. Bev from Ames had both hands over her mouth.
Shelby stepped back. She looked at June, and her face did something complicated, and for half a second June thought she might cry again, right there in front of everyone.
"How are you doing that?" Shelby said. It came out almost a whisper.
June didn't answer. She let her breath out, and leaned forward, and lowered her thumb, slow, slow, breathing with the wind, and the cup came gliding down the runway, the whole length of the counter, four feet, five, toward the far end where the little girl on the farmer's shoulders was stretching out both arms. It set down on the counter right in front of her as softly as a moth.