"I don't understand," June said.
"Will," Dot said. Then, furious, "Wendell. Will." And then she was hitting the arm of the chair, and the nurse came, and they had to go.
In the elevator June's mother leaned against the wall and closed her eyes.
"She's never let anyone have that key," she said. "Not in thirty years. I used to think it was her diary."
"What box does it open?"
Her mother opened her eyes and looked at her, and for a moment she looked like a girl too, a girl in 1955 standing behind a lemonade stand watching her own mother do something impossible.
"The tackle box," she said. "Under the counter. The one with the padlock. I always thought she kept the cash in it."
* * *
Wendell Tate's cotton candy booth stood directly to the east of Dot's, so close that their awning poles nearly touched. It was a small booth, painted sky blue, with a spinning steel bowl in the middle of it and a rack of finished cones in plastic bags clipped along the front like pink and blue clouds caught in a net. WENDELL'S SPUN SUGAR, said the sign. EST. 1953.
June had never thought about that date before. She thought about it now.
He was there before the gates the next morning, as he always was, wiping down his bowl with a white cloth. He was a thin Black man of nearly seventy with a gray mustache trimmed as neat as a hedge and a straw fedora with a red band. He wore a bow tie every day of the fair, even in the heat; June's grandmother used to tease him that he'd be buried in one. He had been at Grandma Dot's bedside in May, June remembered now, had driven down to Albia from Des Moines with a coffee can of peonies from his own yard.
June walked over with the key in her fist.
"Mr. Tate?"
He looked at her. Then he looked at her hand, at the loop of yellow yarn hanging out between her fingers, and he set down his cloth and took off his hat.