"You shouldn't have to," her father said finally. "That's all. You're twelve. You shouldn't have to be up there doing magic tricks to keep a roof over your head. That's supposed to be my job." He breathed out. "I'm proud of you. I want you to know that. I'm real proud of you. I'm just— I'm sorry, June-bug. I'm sorry it's like this."
"It's okay," she said, and meant it, and also didn't, and didn't know how to say both things at once. "Dad? Will you come up? Before it's over? Will you come see it?"
"I've got the second cutting to get in," he said. "And the cattle. I can't just—" He stopped. "I'll try. I'll try, honey."
That was what he said when he meant no.
* * *
The next days blurred.
Monday the Des Moines Register sent a columnist, a rumpled man with a notebook who stood in line like everybody else and watched June float the cup three times and then asked her how she did it, and when she said, "Come take it from me," he laughed so hard he had to sit down on Wendell's spare stool. His column ran Tuesday morning under the headline DOT'S GRANDDAUGHTER KEEPS THE CUP IN THE AIR, with a picture of June mid-float, her face screwed up in concentration, the cup a white blur above the counter. You couldn't see the thread in the photograph. You couldn't see it at all. Wendell bought twelve copies.
June's mother took one up to the hospital Tuesday night, and the nurse said Dot made them tape it to the wall across from her bed where she could see it, and that she'd been pointing at it all day and saying, over and over, the same word: "Mine. Mine. Mine."
"I think she means me," June said, and felt something bloom in her chest she didn't have a name for, either.
The line never got shorter. Rollie Kruse took down his fifty-cent banner Monday morning, without a word, and put up the old one.
Wednesday the wind came.
It came out of the southwest in the early afternoon, ahead of thunderheads piling up over Indianola, hot and full of grit. The striped awning bellied and boomed. June tried to float the cup at two o'clock and the line sang in the wind, an actual high faint whine you could hear if you were standing close, and the cup flew sideways off the runway like a kite with a broken string and spun around the line three times and wrapped itself up in a little white knot, and a man at the front of the line said, "Hey, wait a second—" and leaned in.
Linh, who had been standing beside June ready for anything, swept her arm across the counter and knocked the whole stack of regular cups over. They went everywhere. The man looked down. In the half second he looked down, June reached up and snapped the line with her thumbnail, and the trick cup dropped into her other hand, and she shoved it in her apron pocket, and when the man looked up again there was nothing to see.