“Eighty-seven.”

The guy behind us said “ma’am the line’s moving” and neither of us moved an inch.

I asked where she was born. She said Mercy General. I was born at Mercy General. That hospital closed in 2003, it’s a parking lot now, nobody’s born there anymore and nobody can call them to ask anything.

She told me her mom always said the second baby didn’t make it. My parents were told I was a single birth. One baby. Me.

We did the math right there standing up. Her name’s Robin. Born 3:12 in the afternoon. I was born 3:16. Four minutes. Thirty-eight years and eleven miles apart, and four minutes.

“This isn’t real,” Robin kept saying. “This isn’t real, this isn’t real.” She wasn’t even talking to me anymore, she was talking to the floor.

Turns out she lives eleven miles from me. Same school district. We figured out we rode the same bus route, just different years probably, or maybe even the same years and never once looked twice at each other in a hallway. How does that happen. How do you ride the same bus as your own face and never know.

We stepped out of the line. Forget the licenses. We went and sat in her car in the parking lot because my legs didn’t trust me to drive yet. She had a kid’s car seat in the back and a Sonic cup in the holder, normal stuff, and somehow the normal stuff made it worse. This was a whole real person who’d been alive my entire life.

“I need to call my mom,” she said.

I said, “I need to call mine.”

We both pulled our phones out at the same time and then we both just sat there holding them, not dialing, because what do you even say. “Hey Mom, real quick, was there another baby.” I put mine back in my lap. So did she.

That’s when she said it. The thing I wasn’t ready for.

“There’s something else.” She wouldn’t look at me when she said it. “I have a picture. From the hospital. My mom kept it in a Bible.”

I asked her what was in it.

“Three babies,” she said.

I want to tell you I handled that with grace. I didn’t. I said “what” about four times like an idiot. Three. Not two. Robin started crying, the ugly kind, and she was reaching into her glove box and her hands were shaking so bad she dropped her keys twice.