She didn’t say another word. She turned and walked into the house and left me standing there in her yard like a fool.

I almost left right then. I really did. I thought, well, you’ve gone and scared the poor woman half to death. Go home, you old busybody.

But she came back out. And she had a photograph in her hand. The old kind, with the little white border.

It was a young woman in a hospital bed. Tired, hair stuck to her face. And she was holding two babies. One in each arm.

“My mom had twins,” the woman said. Her voice cracked right in the middle of it. “She kept one. The agency took the other one.”

I just looked at that photo. Two little bundles. I couldn’t have told you which was which. Nobody could.

“I always knew,” she said. “Mom told me when I turned eighteen. She cried about it every single year on our birthday.”

Our birthday. She said our. I caught that.

Then she looked down at my hands. I had them clutched together in front of me, the way I do when I’m nervous.

“You have her hands,” she said. And she held up her own, dirt and all.

Same crooked pinky. Bent right at the top knuckle. The exact same as the one in that obituary photo. The exact same as mine.

“The baby she gave away,” she said, and she put a hand over her mouth. “That was you.”

I didn’t say anything. I think I’d plain forgotten how.

“We’re not cousins,” she said, shaking her head, tears just running down now. “We’re not half-sisters.”

“You’re my twin.”

We stood in that yard a long time. Two grown women crying over a rose bush. The neighbors probably thought somebody had died.

And somebody had, I suppose. Three weeks before, in a hospital up in Knoxville. Margaret. My mother. I missed her by three weeks.

That’s the part that won’t let me sleep at night. She cried every birthday for 57 years, and the whole time I was a four hour drive away. I could have found her. I just didn’t look hard enough, or maybe I looked scared.

My sister’s name is Diane. I have a sister named Diane, and I’m 57 years old, and I only learned that this spring.

We talk on the phone now. Most days. She mailed me the rest of the photos, the ones our mother kept in a shoebox all those years.

But I still haven’t driven up to Knoxville. There’s a grave there with Margaret’s name on it, and I keep telling myself I’ll go this month. Then somehow the month just ends.

I don’t know what a person says to a headstone, anyway.

“Sorry I was late” doesn’t quite cover 57 years, does it.

Diane told me one thing on the phone last week that I keep turning over and over.