The rehabilitation doctor at Iowa Methodist said no on Saturday afternoon. Too soon, too hot, too much stimulation, too much risk. June's mother came back from the hospital and sat down on the sugar sacks and put her face in her hands.
At nine o'clock Saturday night, a rusty green Ford van with SALEM LUTHERAN YOUTH painted on the side came through the camper rows with its headlights bouncing, and June's father got out.
He was in his good jeans and a pressed shirt with hay dust still in the creases of it, and he'd shaved. He had left the second cutting half in, he said, and borrowed the church van because it had a wheelchair ramp. "Your mother called me," he said. "Last night. About Kruse. About the lease." He looked at June across the dark campground like he was seeing her for the first time in a long time. "She said our daughter stood up in front of the whole state fair and told the truth about the trick. I figured if a twelve-year-old could do that, the least I could do is come and help."
"The doctor said no," June said. "He said Grandma can't come."
"Junie," her father said. "In thirty-one years, have you ever known your grandmother to listen to a doctor?"
On Sunday morning they went up to the fourth floor together, all three of them, and her father sat down in the chair beside Dot's bed and explained it to her, slow and plain: the lease, the five o'clock rule, Rollie Kruse, the doctor. Dot listened with her gray eyes fixed on his face. When he was done she lay still a moment. Then she reached over with her good hand and pulled out the tape that held her IV line to her wrist.
The doctor, in the end, signed the day pass. Four hours, a nurse to go with them, the wheelchair, and no excitement.
"No excitement," Dot's nurse said, a young woman named Tammy, as they rolled her up the ramp into the van. "Do you hear me, Dorothea? I mean it."
Dot made a sound that might have been a laugh.
They brought her in through the Grand Avenue gate at three o'clock in the afternoon, the last afternoon of the 1985 Iowa State Fair, with the sun high and hot and the concourse packed solid, and it took them forty-five minutes to go a quarter-mile, because people kept stopping them. Half the fair knew her. Men took off their seed caps. Bev from Ames burst into tears.
At the striped awning, Lorraine Pettit was waiting at the counter with her clipboard and her reading glasses and the renewal form, and Wendell Tate was standing in front of his booth in his bow tie and his straw fedora with tears running openly down into his mustache.
"Well, Dorothea," Wendell said. "Took you long enough."
Dot looked at him. Her mouth worked. "Will," she said, and reached out her good hand, and he took it, and held it, and neither of them said anything at all for a while.