I called Bernice the next morning and asked her to say the name again. She gave me a woman’s name I had heard my entire childhood but never connected to anyone in our family. Bernice said the baby had been born in 1963, six months after my sister, and my mother had taken her home from the hospital before anyone outside the family knew she’d been born. She said my grandmother had told everybody the baby was “staying with relatives,” but that wasn’t what happened. The little girl was raised forty minutes away by a couple who couldn’t have children, and my mother visited her every month until the year she died.
I asked why nobody had ever told me. Bernice said my mother wanted to tell us after her stroke, but my brother refused because he said it would “destroy the family.” Then Bernice told me something I hadn’t expected: the woman had been at my mother’s funeral. She hadn’t approached me because my mother had made her promise not to. I asked what she looked like, and Bernice laughed softly and said, “Honey, you’ve been looking at her in photographs for years.” I pulled out the old family albums and started turning pages. There she was at my sister’s wedding, standing behind my mother with her hand on her shoulder. Nobody had ever introduced her to me.
The next afternoon I drove to the address Bernice gave me. A woman in her sixties opened the door, looked at me for a few seconds, and started crying before I said my name. She said, “You have Mama’s eyes.” We sat at her kitchen table for almost three hours while she told me my mother had written her letters every birthday and every Christmas, even when she couldn’t visit. Then she brought out a small box my mother had given her years earlier. Inside was a photograph of all four of us children — including her — taken in 1963. On the back, in my mother’s shaky handwriting, were six words: “My children. All of them. Always.”
