1 Only Weep When You Win My little sister, Taffeta, peered through a kaleidoscope as we walked to school, her face tipped back, her exposed eye squinched shut. She''d found it in the alley behind Arapahoe Court. Since she refused to give me her hand to hold, I led her by the mitten clipped to the sleeve of her red plaid jacket. "Stop pulling, Grace," she complained. "My mitten''s gonna get yanked off." "Then pay attention to where you''re going." With her eye still pressed to the battered tube, Taffeta shook her head. She looked like a cat with its head stuck in a Pringles can. "Fine," I said, releasing her mitten. "If you slip in a patch of slush and crack open your head, don''t come bawling to me, all right?" There wasn''t any slush left, though. A few weeks earlier it had clogged the gutters like congealed fat, but by now the last of it had melted. No matter the season, Taffeta always dragged her feet during our morning walk. She hated school with a passion I never could understand. Her kindergarten classmates adored her, just like the judges of every beauty pageant she entered. She had immense brown eyes and hair the color of baby-duck feathers. A legendary music in her voice. People approached us on Main Street all the time just to hear her speak--which my mother loved. "Everybody just wishes they had a gift like hers," Momma often said. As a child, I''d resembled Taffeta, even though we were just half sisters. But whatever in me had appealed to pageant judges had long s