"Your mama never asked," he said. "Your mama was scared of it, I think. Thought it was something a little bit wrong. Some folks are like that about tricks." He looked at June steadily. "Are you?"
June thought about it honestly. She thought about Shelby Kruse flicking a cup off the counter. She thought about Bev from Ames staring into an ordinary lemonade, waiting.
"I don't know," she said. "Isn't it lying?"
"Your grandma used to say there's two kinds of lies. One kind takes something from people. The other kind gives them something. A man who sells you a sick cow and tells you she's healthy, he's taking. A woman who makes you believe for two seconds that a cup can fly, and then hands you the cup, and you know it can't, and you know she knows you know, and you both just stand there grinning?" He shrugged. "What'd she take from you? A dollar. What'd she give you?"
June didn't answer. But she slid the brass ring onto her thumb. It was loose. She closed her fist around it to keep it from falling off.
"Gates open in forty minutes," Wendell said. "Want to see if you can drop it?"
* * *
She could drop it. She could drop it beautifully.
The first time, she tied the thread to the ring with Wendell's help, and he tied the other end off up on his pole, and he threaded one of the trick cups on it with a pair of tweezers, and the cup hung there in the middle of the air in front of the stand, white with its yellow lemon, and June's heart did a thing like a fish jumping. Then she tried to lift her hand and her hand jerked, and the cup swung like a hanged man and spun around and threw its splash of water down the front of her shirt.
The second time she lifted too slow and the cup just sagged on the line, a little dead thing.
The third time the thread snapped.
"That's all right," Wendell said, already rethreading. "That happens. She'd go through a spool every fair. It's the knot. Here. Here's how Valentin tied it." He showed her, an odd little doubled loop that bit down on itself. "Again."
The gates opened. She had to stop. For the rest of Friday she squeezed lemons and sold cups and said she's getting better and every time she had a free minute she took out the black notebook and read.