The name was Denise. I knew it immediately because Denise was my cousin, the woman I had been searching for in the sign-in book. But when I asked the girl at the desk why she was listed as my mother’s daughter, she shook her head. “That’s what your mother told us. Every Tuesday she comes in, sits beside her, and calls her Mom.” My hands started shaking because Denise had supposedly been my cousin my entire life. I called her that afternoon and asked where she had been every Tuesday. There was a long silence before she finally said, “You really found out.”
Denise came to my house that evening carrying an old cardboard box. Inside were photographs, hospital records, and a letter my mother had written before her second stroke. Denise wasn’t my cousin. She was my mother’s first daughter. She had been born six years before me and given up for adoption after my mother became seriously ill. My mother had spent decades believing Denise was better off without her, so she never told me she existed. They had reconnected quietly four years earlier, and Denise had been visiting every Tuesday because my mother could no longer remember most of the family. She remembered Denise, though. She always called her by the same childhood nickname.
I drove to Cedar Terrace the next Sunday and found my mother sitting by the window. Denise was already there, holding her hand. My mother looked at me, smiled, and then looked at Denise. “I knew you’d both come,” she said. I sat beside them and realized that for four years, my mother hadn’t been keeping another daughter from me. She had been trying to give both of us a chance to know each other before she forgot who we were. Then she squeezed my hand and whispered, “Now you don’t have to wonder where your sister went.”
