"Was," Wendell said. "Valentin Sobczak. Polish fella from Chicago. Ran a little ten-in-one show on the carnival circuit after the war, mostly county fairs. Fire-eater, a strong man, a lady with snakes, and Valentin himself, who did the floating. Your grandmother joined up in forty-seven when she was nineteen, ran away from a turkey farm in Albia, and made her daddy so mad he didn't speak to her for two years. I was the boy who ran the generator and fed the snakes." He smiled under his mustache. "Only colored boy on that whole carnival. There were towns we went to where I wasn't supposed to be on the lot after sundown. Your grandmother was the one who'd walk me back to the truck. Big as she was, nobody said a word to her. Nobody said a word to me with her walking beside me, either."
June didn't know what to say. She held the notebook against her chest.
"Valentin died in fifty-two," Wendell said. "Heart. He left Dot the notebook and he left me the spool, and we figured we'd split the difference. Fair board gave us two spots side by side in fifty-three. Been here ever since." He nodded up at the striped awning. "You ever wonder why her canopy looks like that?"
"She said so people could find her."
"Well, that's true too. But look." He took the spool from her, gently, found the loose end with his thumbnail, and drew out an arm's length of the line. He held it up between his two hands, in front of the striped canvas.
June couldn't see it. She knew it was there, his hands were stretched apart around it, and she still couldn't see it. Against the stripes it just vanished, broken into a hundred pieces by the yellow and white and gray, never in front of any one color long enough to show.
"Magician's thread," Wendell said. "Valentin used silk, back in the day. Dot switched to the nylon after it came out. That's six-pound test, split down the middle into one strand. Strong enough to hold a cup with a little lemonade in it. Too thin to see unless the sun's at your back and you know exactly where to look. And on a stripe like that?" He shook his head. "You could look right at it all day."
"So it's on a string," June said. She had known it, somehow, all along. It was still a little like learning there was no Santa Claus. "The cup's just on a string."
"The cup's on a string," Wendell agreed. "And the Mona Lisa's just paint." He let the thread go slack. "One end ties off over here." He reached up to the top of his own awning pole, the one nearest Dot's, and June saw for the first time that there was a tiny brass screw eye set into the wood up there, almost hidden by a bolt. "Other end goes to that." He pointed at the ring. "Thread runs from my pole, across the front of the stand, right under the edge of the awning, and ends at the ring on her thumb. The cup hangs on the thread. Those two little holes there, see, the line goes in one side and out the other. Holes are above the middle of the cup, so it hangs plumb and doesn't tip. You raise your hand, the thread lifts, the cup lifts. You lower it, the cup comes down. You lean back, the cup slides toward you. You lean forward, it slides away. You do it smooth, and folks see a lemonade cup take off from the counter and go sailing through the air on its own."
"But it can't go where people are standing. They'd walk into the thread."
"That's right. It stays in a lane. Front of the counter, about chest high, from her hand over to my pole. Valentin called it the runway." He grinned. "And then the cup comes down to the counter at the far end, right by the customer, and they reach for it, and it's just lemonade in their hand, and the thread slides right out the holes as the cup comes off because she gives it a little slack. Nobody ever found a thing. You could hand it to the sheriff."
June looked at the twelve cups, at the ring, at the notebook. "Why are you telling me? She never told my mom."
Wendell was quiet a while.