"It," Dot said. "From. Me."
And the cup began to float.
It rose off the counter as smooth as anything June had ever done, smoother, because it wasn't only June doing it; she felt her grandmother's hand lead and her own hand follow, the heart lifting and the thumb coming after, thirty-two years of summers in the muscles of an old woman's wrist. The cup climbed to the height of a person's heart and hung there, turning, gold with sun. Then it began to glide down the runway, past Linh, past June's mother, past the cigar box, all the way to the far end of the counter, where Shelby Kruse was standing with lemon juice on her hands.
It came down in front of her, soft as a moth.
Shelby didn't grab it. She stood looking at it with her hands at her sides. She looked up at Dot. She looked at June.
"Can I?" she said.
"It's yours," June said. "It's always been yours."
Shelby picked up the cup with both hands, the way the little girl had on the first Sunday, like an egg. She held it against her chest. She didn't drink it. She just held it and stood there and cried, in front of half the fair and her father, and nobody laughed, not one single person.
Lorraine Pettit stood up and wiped her eyes under her reading glasses with one knuckle and held out the clipboard. "Well," she said, a little roughly. "I'd call that operating."
Dot signed with her left hand. It took her a long time. The letters wobbled up and down the line like a fence on a hill. But it was her name, every letter of it, DOROTHEA LINDGREN, and when she was done she dropped the pen and looked across the concourse at Rollie Kruse, and did not turn her back on him, for once in thirty-two years; she just looked, steady and gray, until he lowered his eyes and turned around and went back to his trailer.
The applause started at the counter and rolled back through the whole concourse, until people who couldn't even see the stand were clapping because everyone around them was.
June looked around for her father. He was at the back of the stand, by the sugar sacks, where she hadn't noticed him. He had his hat in his hands. He wasn't clapping. He was just looking at her, the way he looked at the sky in June when the corn was knee-high and the rain came right on time, and couldn't seem to stop.
* * *