Early on Saturday, I took a walk in the badlands.

I brought my English notes, although I didn’t plan to study much. If finals were anything like midterms, I had nothing to worry about.

I followed one of the water trails tapering into the hills. The only sounds were the crunching of my shoes, the occasional low-pitched buzz of an insect, and the hush of a gentle wind—not the slightest bit wild—ruffling the dry grasses and shrubs. As I stopped at a crest, gazing out at the gradients of blue hills, brown hills, gray hills, I thought, Mandarin would have loved it out here.

Because despite the silence, the badlands didn’t only contain dead things. On my walks, I’d seen ground squirrels and jackrabbits, rattlesnakes, and hawks soaring over prairies of salt sage, the kind we used to chew as little kids. I’d seen oases, where the water burbled up from underground and green things grew. And summer grasshoppers that popped away from my feet like water tossed onto a hot skillet.

I’d been so cautious about sharing my magic places, I hadn’t showed Mandarin any. Not the badlands. And not the Tombs. Not the Virgin Mary rock. Or any of my rocks.

I had called Mandarin selfish. But maybe in my own way, I was selfish too.

I didn’t start back until the midday sun became so hot my blood practically simmered in my ears. Although home life had rarely been pleasant, after the fiasco at the tri-county pageant, an uneasy cloud had seemed to envelop our entire house.

Without pageants pending, Momma didn’t know what to do with herself. She wandered from room to room, up the stairs and down. She drank so much coffee I wondered why she didn’t go into cardiac arrest. She started meals but didn’t finish them, leaving the ingredients all over the counter. When we passed each other in the kitchen, it was hard to tell who was giving the silent treatment to whom.

Really, Momma and I were just stalling. Like boxers in their respective corners before a match began, each waiting for the other to make the first move. If there had been just the two of us, the dance could have gone on forever. But there was a third contestant in the ring neither of us had anticipated.

I had just climbed out of the shower when I heard a splashing sound. At first, I thought I had water in my ears. Then I glanced out the bathroom window and spied Taffeta in the backyard, which was strange for several reasons.

First, our backyard was a disaster: an overgrown wasteland of broken toys and weeds. My sister seldom played out there, especially since the Millers had a swing set complete with monkey bars and a faux rock-climbing wall.

Second, she was wearing her tri-county pageant dress, along with her Little Miss Washokey tiara.

Third, she was sitting in the baby pool.

I wasn’t sure whether I should be concerned or delighted. In my room, I pulled on a T-shirt and underpants. Then I flew down the stairs, jerked open the sliding glass door, and stepped outside.

“Taffeta! What the heck’s going on?”

My sister didn’t answer. She sat with her chin on her fist, like that sculpture The Thinker. Her uncombed hair straggled down her back. The murky rainwater from the baby pool had soaked into her dress, staining it the color of grease.

“Did you put all that on yourself?”

She still didn’t answer.

“I didn’t think you had it in you.” I knelt beside her. “Guess I shouldn’t have underestimated you. When you want to, you can be a real stubborn brat.”

No reply.

“I mean that in a good way.” I offered her my hand. “Look, Taffeta. I’m sorry I left your pageant early. Truly sorry. So you’ve made your point. Will you get out now?”

She shook her head. At least it was a response.

I prodded the earth in front of me until I found a stone. With my thumbnail, I began to scrape away the dirt.

“This reminds me of last winter, when you begged me to push you on the swings. Remember? I didn’t want to, because it was so windy. But you kept whining, so I finally gave in.”

My sister shifted in the water. I could tell she was listening.

“So I pushed you. And soon the wind picked up, just like I said it would, and you started swinging all crooked. You wanted off. But your mittens stuck to the chains. Don’t you remember? We had to leave them there. Momma was so mad.…”

I heard the sliding door open. Momma, wearing her infamous muumuu, stood in the doorway.

“Oh,” she said.

Like it was perfectly normal for her daughters to congregate in and around an old baby pool that hadn’t budged through two winters, one daughter in her underwear, the other wrecking the pageant dress into which she’d sewn all her superficial hopes and dreams.

“You didn’t even know she was out here,” I said accusingly, scrambling to my feet.

“Don’t be silly. Of course I did.”

“That’s not true, Momma! You couldn’t have known—you’d be freaking out!”

Even though I was yelling, for once Momma didn’t raise her voice. She looked at me and said quietly, “I always know where you girls are.”

You girls? I shook my head, thinking of all the far-flung nooks and crannies where Mandarin and I had assembled. “No you don’t. You have no idea where I go.”

“I know more than you think.”

“How?” I demanded. “How do you know?”

“I have my ways.”

Thinking of Polly Bunker, I narrowed my eyes. “Gossip.”

“That, and other methods.”

“You could have just asked.”

“You never would have told me.”

She was right. “But it would have meant something,” I said. “The asking.”

At last, Momma came over and stood in front of us. Her eyes wandered from one daughter to the other. I could tell it took her every milligram of willpower not to swoop Taffeta out of the baby pool and dunk her, pageant dress and all, in a soapy bath. But she just stood there with her arms crossed.

“I know I’m not a good mother,” she said at last. “But I know I’m not a terrible mother either.”

I sighed. Did she expect me to be thankful? In my opinion, there were far too many mediocre mothers, and fathers, and not nearly enough good ones. In Washokey, at least. Maybe my sample was too small.

“You know, Grace, I didn’t mean to be pregnant with you,” Momma began.

“Momma …” I glanced at Taffeta.

“Just let me finish. Things like that don’t necessarily happen when you’re ready. Hell, I wasn’t much older than Mandarin. Eighteen’s just a number. I wasn’t anything near an adult … It was the hardest thing I ever had to do, growing up that fast.”

“Then why, Momma? Why’d you have me in the first place?”

The question shot out before I could stop it, burning my eyes, my throat. I ordered myself not to cry. Not now. Not worth it.

Momma shrugged helplessly. “You were my baby.”

She took a step closer.

“After everything I went through, I promised myself I’d make life easy for you girls. That’s what the pageants were about. I wanted the world to fall down at your feet. When you wrecked your Little Miss Washokey … it was like you were flipping me off. All that time I’d spent—I thought it was our time.”

“The road trips,” I said. “Not the pageants. The pageants were your time.”

It felt strange saying them out loud, the words I hadn’t been able to articulate for years and years. They came easier than I’d have ever believed.

Just words. Nothing more.

“I guess it was how I knew to be close to you,” Momma said. “And we were close, way back when. Weren’t we?”

“We were,” I agreed quietly.

Neither of us said what should have followed: Maybe we can become close again. But I knew we both were thinking it.

We stood there for a while longer, our eyes flickering away from each other’s. Finally, Momma reached down and lifted up Taffeta. She didn’t resist. Brown water streamed from her dress, seeping onto Momma’s muumuu.

“You don’t have to be in pageants anymore,” Momma said to Taffeta. “You don’t ever have to sing again, if you don’t want to.”

“But I want to.”

“Really?” Momma and I exclaimed at once. I felt like my brain was about to spontaneously combust. All my memories of pageants were tinged with irritation. It had never occurred to me that my sister had actually enjoyed some part of them.

“I just get to choose the songs I sing,” she said. “Songs I like singing. How about that?”

“Sure, honey!” Momma’s eyes looked misty. “Like what songs?”

Taffeta thought for a moment. “Maybe something disco.”

I waited until Momma was busy in the kitchen making Hawaiian salad and Taffeta was getting dressed after a much-needed bath. Then I dug through the scum in the baby pool until I found what I was looking for.

I kept it in my hand as I dialed Mandarin’s number.