The Longest Line

His mother was taking a bottle of suntan lotion out of her handbag.
“You need more lotion, Lu.”
She spread some on his face, and didn’t rub it in deeply enough. He could have been dressed up as a ghost for Halloween. He could have been a young dead boy inside The Haunted Mansion.
The two were at the Magic Kingdom. They were waiting in line for Dumbo. The wait had been posted at sixty minutes, but his mother had checked her watch frequently, perhaps every single time she had found herself trying to eke out the last drops of her bottle of diet cola. The sign was wrong. They had been waiting for ninety minutes, if not more. And there was nothing between them and the sun. Luckily, they weren’t far from the front.
“How much longer, Mom?”
“Judging from the length of the ride, and the amount of people in front of us, I would say, oh, five, ten minutes.”
“What does judging mean?”
“Making an informed decision based on different sets of variables.” She was grinding her teeth.
“What?”
Five minutes later, they were fastening their harnesses inside the Dumbo wearing the yellow hat. His mother let him control how high or low the flying elephant went. As they took off, and little Luther started laughing, all was suddenly right again.