Then she turned and walked back across the river of people toward the big white trailer, and the girls followed her like ducks.
June bent down and picked the cup up out of the sawdust. Her hand was shaking. She dropped the cup in the trash can and took the next customer's dollar and gave back a quarter and said thank you, and did not cry, and did not cry, and did not cry.
"Don't let her get under your skin," her mother said quietly, after.
"She's already under it," June said.
* * *
Grandma Dot's room at Iowa Methodist was on the fourth floor and smelled of Lysol and the Jell-O they gave everyone at four-thirty. There was a window with a view of a parking ramp and, beyond it, if you stood on your tiptoes, the very top of the Sky Glider cables down at the fairgrounds, a thin line against the evening.
Dot was in her wheelchair by that window when they came in. She had been a big woman once, with arms that could lift a full keg of syrup. The stroke had taken twenty pounds and something else June didn't have a name for. Her white hair, which she had always worn pinned up in a bun with two yellow pencils stuck through it, hung loose to her shoulders. Her right hand lay in her lap like a glove somebody had left there.
But her eyes were the same. Gray as creek stones, and sharp, and the second June came through the door they went straight to her face and read everything on it.
"Hi, Mama," June's mother said, and kissed her forehead. "We did all right today. Two hundred and six dollars."
Dot's mouth worked. "Good," she said, which was one of her words. Then she kept looking at June.
"It was fine," June said. "Bev from Ames says hi."
Dot made a sound that might have been a laugh. Then she lifted her good hand, her left, and pointed at June, and then, very deliberately, at her own eye, and then at June again. I see you.
"It's nothing," June said.
Dot pointed again. Harder.