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to Taffeta’s father, an electrician from Idaho with a Mazda Miata so small he drove with his knees halfway to his chin, had lasted less than a year. I always assumed, as she must have, that all these distinctions made her somebody the other mothers admired. Not somebody they mocked.
    The humiliation lingered long after I left the deli. It lasted for weeks, flooding back every time I saw Alexis or Mrs. Bunker, or even the Sundrop Quik Stop.
    But worse than the humiliation was the pity. It felt like Christmas-flu vomit double-boiling in my gut. The worst feeling I had ever felt, compounded because I didn’t want to feel it. Not for my mother.

    As I neared the kitchen, the opera music grew louder and louder until I went around the corner and found its source: an old boom box at Momma’s feet.
    I hated opera music. The women sounded like hysterical monkeys. The men sounded like they were gargling. But Momma loved it—or at least, she pretended to.
    She sat beside Taffeta at the glossy round table and had pulled out a third chair in invitation. A blue pageant dress was draped over the fourth chair, like a guest. I seated myself and stared at the soggy glob of pink-tinged lettuce on the plate in front of me. I recognized chunks of canned pineapple, and what were possibly bits of ham.
    “I found this recipe in Cuisine at Home magazine,” Momma said. “Doesn’t it look divine?”
    She spoke with the bad British accent she’d been working on for a few weeks. Just the past month she’d been trying to talk like a Southern belle.
    Momma was only thirty-three, but the Wyoming sun had aged her face prematurely. That day she’d wound her brown hair into a french twist, and like any respectable cosmetics saleslady, she wore plenty of makeup. Her lips appeared to be shellacked. Mascara clung so thickly to her lashes they looked like spiders. When she slipped one foot from its platform espadrille sandal and switched off the music with her toe, I could imagine her sitting at the table practicing that motion while we were upstairs.
    “So, Grace,” she began. “Polly Bunker called and said you lost the essay contest. Why didn’t you tell me?”
    “I didn’t lose, exactly,” I said. “I got second place. I won fifty dollars.”
    “She won fifty dollars,” Taffeta repeated.
    Momma smiled patronizingly. “You mean they gave you fifty dollars in consolation. That was awfully kind of them. They don’t always give runners-up prizes.”
    I speared a pineapple fragment so brutally the tips of my fork clanked against my plate.
    “Though speaking of winning,” Momma continued, “Little Miss Washokey is coming up. And we all know what an important pageant this is. When Taffeta wins this year, she’ll be eligible for the tri-county pageant, and after that, the state pageant, and after that—if the Lord wills it—the stars!”
    I wondered what the Lord thought about her invoking his name. I glanced at Taffeta. She just sat there, sucking her fingers—a habit left over from toddlerhood. At least it wasn’t her thumb.
    I guessed you could call Taffeta Counterexhibit A: Momma’s final hope. Taffeta’s miraculous voice was proof things might be on the upswing. That year, Momma hadn’t entered her in any pageants prior to Little Miss Washokey. Everybody in town knew about Taffeta’s voice, but Momma didn’t want to reveal her secret weapon prematurely.
    “Grace, you remember competing in your Little Miss Washokey, don’t you?”
    She brought it up at the start of every pageant season. Like clockwork. I felt something gritty between my teeth. I stared at my mushy lettuce, trying to determine what variety of Hawaiian produce could account for a crunch. “Not really,” I replied.
    “Well, everyone else in this town does. Especially Polly Bunker. She’ll never let me forget about Alexis’s win. She wouldn’t have won at all if it weren’t for your debacle onstage. I know you remember.”
    “I remember too,” Taffeta