I turned that photograph over at the counter and read the pencil on the back, and I had to grip the edge of the table, because the young woman holding the baby in front of the church was my mother, and the words underneath changed everything I thought I knew about myself.
She kept one of us. She gave the other one to my aunt. I never had the nerve to tell you which one of us was supposed to be kept.
I had a twin. A brother. My mother, young and unwed in a hard year, had two babies, and she could only keep one, so she kept me and gave my brother to be raised by an aunt in another town, and she never told me, and she carried it to her grave.
My brother knew. He spent his life knowing he had a twin sister across the county, and somewhere in his last years he found me. But he could not make himself walk up and say it. What do you say. So he did the only thing his shy, aching heart could manage.
Every Thursday for four years my own twin brother sat somewhere in that diner, watching over the sister he was too frightened to speak to, and quietly paying for her breakfast, just so that once a week he could do one small thing for the family he was given away from.
When he knew he was dying, he paid for fifty more Thursdays in advance, so the caring would outlast him, and he left the photograph with the waitress with instructions to give it to me only if he did not come back.
He did not come back. His name was in the paper that Saturday. I had eaten breakfast twenty feet from my own brother every week for four years and never knew his face.
I grieved him harder than I have grieved almost anyone, a brother I met only in a photograph and a stack of paid receipts. But I also found his family. He had a daughter, my niece, who knew all about me, because her father had talked about the twin sister he watched over at the diner and never had the courage to greet.
She told me he used to come home on Thursdays lighter, happy, because he had gotten to take care of his sister, even from across a room.
I go to that counter every Thursday still. But now my niece comes with me, and we split a plate, and we talk about the shy, gentle man who spent four years buying breakfast for a sister he loved from a distance, and who made sure, when he was gone, that I would finally know I was never an only child at all.