June gave the line a hair of slack, the way Wendell had shown her. The thread slipped out of the two pinholes like nothing.
"Go ahead," June said to the little girl. "It's yours."
The little girl looked at her father. Her father lifted her down. She picked the cup up off the counter with both hands, holding it like an egg, and turned it around and around, and looked underneath it, and looked inside it, and looked up at the sky. Then she took a sip and said, in a voice that carried over the whole crowd, "It tastes like regular!"
And the concourse fell apart.
* * *
By one o'clock the line at Dot's ran past Wendell's booth and past the Pork Producers' tent and bent around the corner by the Sky Glider. By two, June's mother had sent Linh running to the Hy-Vee on University Avenue with forty dollars from the cigar box for more lemons, and Linh had come back in a cab with three bags in her lap, grinning so hard her face looked like it would split.
Everybody wanted to see it.
June floated the cup every twenty minutes, because Wendell said any more often and people would start studying instead of watching. Every time, she said the words. Every time, the crowd made that sound. A man from Sioux City floated a twenty-dollar bill onto the counter and wouldn't take change. An old woman in a lavender pantsuit stood at the front of the line and wept, openly, and told June she had seen Dot float her first cup in 1953 and had brought her own daughter and her daughter's daughter and had been afraid, all week, that she'd never see it again.
June dropped it once, at three-fifteen. A gust came down the concourse off the Grandstand and the cup swung and she jerked her thumb and it pitched forward and spilled a splash of lemonade across the counter. Her stomach turned to ice.
But the crowd only laughed and groaned, the way people groan when a pitcher walks a batter, and somebody yelled, "Try again, honey!" and she did, with her face burning, and the second time it went perfect. They clapped louder for that one than for any of the others.
"See?" Wendell said, when she glanced over at him. He was spinning a pink cone without looking at it. "Now they're on your side."
They closed at ten. June's mother counted the money at the camper's little fold-down table under the dome light, with the curtains pulled, and Linh and June sat on the bunk across from her and watched the stacks grow. Ones. Fives. A whole fat stack of quarters she rolled in paper sleeves. The twenty from the man from Sioux City.
Her mother counted it twice. Then she put her hands flat on the table on either side of the money and didn't say anything for a while.