Just before she died last year, my Mama told me a secret.
I was not hers by blood. She and Daddy took me to West Virginia a few days after I was born right here in Coalville. My parents, she said, were good kids who got in to trouble. They were children of Catholic coal miners who went off into the woods and created me, which caused a heap of trouble in her Irish household and my blood Daddy's Lithuanian home.
Mama laughed through her cancer pain, remembering how the families seemed to not know which was worse -- that my birth Mama was pregnant or that she loved a Lithuanian. Morphine will make you laugh over sad stuff, I reckon.
I wanted to know their names, but she said she didn't know if she should tell me. She knew there were other children, girls, and she didn't think they had been told about me. There was no sense in wrecking lives just because I was thinking like a selfish person, she said.
"Mama," I begged, "They'd be grown like me now. It's not like I'd be uprooting their whole family or anything." Sisters. I had sisters up north, I thought.
"People don't much care for meeting with past pains, Mary. I should not have said anything. I'm losing my senses." Mama closed her eyes and died.
I was alone.