"Oh, honey. You tell her Bev from Ames said hi. We've been coming since Kennedy." The woman paid and took her cup and stood there a moment looking at it, as if waiting for it to do something. Then she walked away, and June watched her drink from it like it was any old lemonade from anywhere.
By noon June had said she's getting better thirty-one times. She had counted.
At twelve-fifteen, Shelby Kruse came across the concourse.
June knew who she was before she knew her name, the way you know weather. Across the concourse and down three stands was Kruse's Famous Lemon Shake-Up, which was not famous anywhere June had heard of but was large: a long white trailer with a red-and-yellow canopy and two serving windows and a hand-lettered banner that said BIGGEST CUP ON THE CONCOURSE. There was another Kruse trailer by the Grandstand, and a corn dog trailer near the Sky Glider, and a funnel cake wagon over by the Swine Barn. Rollie Kruse, who owned all of them, was a big man with a silver belt buckle and a voice you could hear over the generators. June's grandmother did not like him. She had never said so; she had only, every year, turned her back when he walked by.
Shelby was fourteen, maybe. Tall and tanned, with a perm that had been expensive once and a pink Kruse's T-shirt knotted at the hip. She had two girls with her, both in jelly sandals, both laughing at something before anything had happened. She walked right up to the counter, leaned her elbows on it, and looked up at the sign.
"Watch it fly," she read aloud, slow, like a teacher reading a bad essay. "So? I'm watching."
"It's not—" June started. "My grandma's sick."
"Your grandma's sick," Shelby repeated. The girls laughed. "That's sad. That's really sad. So the floating lemonade doesn't float. So it's just lemonade. That's false advertising, you know. My dad says you could get shut down for false advertising." She picked up one of the empty cups from the stack and turned it over in her fingers. "What's it supposed to do, anyway? Grow wings?"
"Put that down, please," June's mother said from the back, mild as milk.
Shelby put it down. Then she flicked it with one finger, so it tipped and rolled across the counter and off the edge onto the sawdust.
"Oops," she said. "It fell. Guess it doesn't float."
The two jelly-sandal girls just about died.
June felt the heat go up her neck and into her ears. She had a whole speech, suddenly, about how her grandma had been floating lemonade on this corner since before Shelby Kruse was a thought, about how none of this was funny, how the word proceed was not funny. It went all the way up to her throat and stuck there like a jawbreaker.
"My dad's gonna get this corner, you know," Shelby said, almost kindly. "He put in for it already. Everybody knows. Your grandma can't run it, and you sure can't. You should just sell to him now and save yourself the embarrassment." She straightened up and looked June in the face for the first time. Her eyes were a light, washed-out blue. There was something tight at the corners of them that June would only think about later. "This is a business, kid. It's not a museum."