…born in 1975, when your mother was sixteen.”
My mother had a daughter at sixteen. She’d named her Laura, after her own mother. My grandparents forced her to give the baby up for adoption. Two years later, my mother married my father and had me. She named me Laura too.
She never told me. She never told anyone except her sister, my aunt Diane.
The woman at the funeral was my older sister, Laura Price. She’d found our mother through a DNA test the year before she died. They’d met in secret a few times. My mother had asked my aunt to make sure Laura could attend the funeral if anything happened.
When I ended up in the hospital, my aunt saw a chance to keep the secret. She told the guests that Laura was me. Nobody questioned it. We looked that much alike.
“She played the daughter perfectly” wasn’t a cruel joke. My aunt had been grateful. She’d been trying to protect my mother’s secret, as she’d promised.
I found Laura through the funeral director’s records. She was living two hours away. When I called her and told her who I was, she said, “I’ve been waiting twenty years for you to call.”
We met at our mother’s grave. We brought the same flowers: white roses. We hadn’t planned it.
Laura told me about the four times she’d met our mother. She said Mom talked about me the whole time. I told her about growing up with the same mother she’d been denied. We cried until the groundskeeper brought us chairs.
My aunt apologized. She said she’d been trying to keep a promise. I told her the promise was finally over.
