So June told her. She hadn't meant to. She meant to tell it as a funny story, the way her father told stories about hailstorms, but halfway through, the part about the cup rolling off the counter, her voice went thin, and by the end, it's a business, kid, it's not a museum, she was crying after all, ugly and hiccupping, standing in the middle of a hospital room with her hands in fists.
"And everyone asks," she said. "All day. Where's the floating, where's the floating. And I have to say you're sick, and they look at me like I'm a broken jukebox. And Mom doesn't know how you did it, and nobody knows, and the sign's a lie now. It's just a lie. And Rollie Kruse is going to take your corner, and we're going to lose the farm, and I can't do anything."
Dot's face had gone very still. Her mother had a hand over her own mouth.
Then Dot reached down beside her wheelchair, to the canvas bag that hung on its handle, the bag where the nurses kept her slippers and her reading glasses. She fumbled in it with her good hand for a long time, so long that June's mother finally said, "Mama, let me—" and Dot slapped at her, not hard, and kept fumbling.
What she came up with was a key. A small brass key on a loop of yellow yarn.
She held it out to June.
"What is it?"
Dot's mouth worked. The word came up out of her like a bucket out of a deep well, slow and slopping. "Box," she said.
"What box?"
Dot shook her head, frustrated. She jabbed the air with the key. She tried again. Her lips shaped something, and nothing came, and she shut her eyes and breathed through her nose, and opened them, and said, perfectly clearly, as if it were the easiest word in the world:
"Wendell."
June took the key. It was warm from her grandmother's hand.
"Wendell Tate?" her mother said, puzzled. "The cotton candy man?"
Dot nodded. Then she did a thing June would remember for the rest of her life. She took June's wrist in her good hand, turned it over, palm up, and with one finger drew a slow line across it, from the base of the thumb to the far edge, light as a hair. Then she lifted the finger, as if lifting something off the line, and opened her hand in the air between them, and smiled.