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how that had turned out.
    What I felt about Momma was more of a sourness in my mouth than a feeling, a taste like rotten milk. I hated how everything Adrina Carpenter did was an obvious attempt to compensate for her own fall from grace fifteen years earlier, when she’d gotten pregnant with me. Although her schemes rarely worked the way she meant them to.
    Exhibit A: Femme Fatale
    Employed as a freelance saleslady for Femme Fatale Cosmetics, Inc., Momma took it upon herself to beautify the tri-county area. She found her best success with weathered old ranch wives yearning to make themselves lovely for their livestock and husbands. She knew just how to appeal to the itch she claimed every woman had, an itch that only amplified the farther a woman removed herself from civilization.
    But no matter how successful a businesswoman Momma claimed to be, I knew we lived off the inheritance from my father and Taffeta’s child support, not Femme Fatale profits.
    Exhibit B: Our house
    Because Momma had spent time in Jackson Hole as a teenager, she thought of herself as sophisticated, the most cultured of all her friends—although everybody knew she’d grown up in our house at 17 Pioneer Ridge. When her grandmother died twelve years earlier and left us the house (Momma’s parents had died when she was a teenager), Momma pledged to make it the envy of Washokey.
    The result was a museum of unfinished projects: partially papered hallways, mismatched pieces of secondhand furniture, half-hemmed curtains that hung in different lengths.
    Exhibit C: Décor
    One of the monthly magazines Momma subscribed to included foldout posters of famous paintings. She ironed each one and displayed them in fifty-cent frames from the junk shop, staggered diagonally down the stairway. I knew them like old friends: Van Gogh’s Wheatfield with Crows , Degas’s Ballerinas in Blue , Bruegel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus .
    Momma took pride in memorizing the accompanying articles and quoting art-related details to her girlfriends. She only occasionally made an ass of herself by jumbling up the facts. Nobody ever noticed, but it made me shake my head.
    Exhibit D: Me
    Momma’s first hope. Her worst mistake. And her harshest critic.
    When I was younger, Momma’s affectations ranged from mildly annoying to utterly exasperating. But I thought she fooled everyone else—until the spring I turned eleven, when I came across Alexis’s mother, Polly Bunker, talking with Mrs. Snelson in the gas station deli.
    The gas station deli—aka the Sundrop Quik Stop—was the kind of place where men finished beers first and then paid for the empty bottles. It sold milk and sandwiches, fireworks alongside handles of Jim Beam, and novelty crap like rubber cow pies and lighters bejeweled with American flags. I was perusing the distressingly limited selection of paperbacks when I overheard the two women talking.
    “She said it was Armani!” Polly Bunker exclaimed. “But Tracy Drummely told me she put it out four days ago at the Bargain Boutique. The tags said Old Navy .”
    “Oh no.” Mrs. Snelson chuckled. “Military surplus?”
    “You think she’d bother to be more sneaky about it. But ever since she won that Femme Fatale sweepstakes a couple months back, she’s gotten cocky.”
    “Like it’d have fooled anybody.”
    “What big-time designer’d ever pick orange and pink plaid, anyways?”
    When I blinked, I saw plaid. Orange and pink plaid. The colors of Momma’s new coat. Polly Bunker and Mrs. Snelson were making fun of my mother.
    In a tiny town like Washokey, nothing’s worse than being made fun of behind your back—especially by somebody like Polly Bunker, Momma’s so-called best friend and the worst gossip in town. I knew Momma was different than other Washokey mothers. She didn’t drink. She didn’t go to church. Sometimes she played poker, but she wasn’t any good. She didn’t date, claiming that women didn’t need men to be happy; her marriage