They counted it at the camper table for the last time that night after Tammy the nurse had taken Dot back up to the fourth floor, asleep in the van with a smile on her face and Wendell's white cloth in her good hand. June's mother counted. Her father watched, sitting on the bunk with Linh asleep against his shoulder.
Eleven days. Lemons and sugar and cups and fees and gas and Linh's bus tickets paid. Two thousand eight hundred and seventeen dollars.
"That's the payment," her mother said. She said it like a prayer. "That's the whole payment and four hundred and seventy-seven left over."
Her father didn't say anything. He reached over and put his hand on top of June's head, the way he used to when she was small, and left it there.
It wasn't over. June knew that, even then. There would be another letter next year, and the year after that,and the red barn would lean a little further every spring. But it was this year. It was enough for this year. Most of life, she would learn, comes down to that: enough for this year, and the people who stand next to you while you find it.
They drove home Monday at dawn, through the corn, her father driving the church van with June beside him and her mother following in the Buick with the bad muffler. Neither of them talked for a long time. The sun came up over the fields on the left side of the road and turned the tassels gold.
"Junie," her father said finally. "Can I ask you how it works? The penny thing. Your mother said there's a penny."
June looked at him. Then she smiled.
"Come next August," she said, "and I'll show you."
He laughed. It was the first time she'd heard him laugh since spring.
In her lap, she had the black notebook. On the very last page, below Wendell's She's right, there was a new entry. It was in pencil, in round careful handwriting June didn't know, and it said: Thank you for letting me take it. I'll be back next year if you need help with the lemons. — S.K.
And under that, in big shaking capitals that slanted down off the edge of the line like a fence on a hill, in the only hand left that her grandmother could use:
GET HER UP HERE.