Carolyn. The name on the signature card was Carolyn Mae Dowd. I had never heard it in my life.
The woman from my exercise class was named Pat. She was a retired school secretary, and she had carried that passbook around in her purse for six months because she did not know who to trust with it. I told her she could have trusted me, and she said she knew that now.
We went to the bank together. The lady there could not tell us much about the account. But she could tell us the account holder was a woman named Edna Dowd, and that Edna had died in 1983.
My mother had a sister named Edna. I knew that much. Mama never talked about her. I thought they had a falling out.
So I went through the one box of papers from Mama that I did not donate. At the bottom, in an envelope marked for later, was the obituary. Edna Dowd, age thirty one, killed in a car accident outside Lexington in May 1983. Survived by her sister, my mother, and a daughter, Carolyn, age six.
I had a cousin. I never knew.
There was also a letter from a lawyer. Edna had a life insurance policy, and she named my mother to hold the money for Carolyn until she turned twenty one. But her father took Carolyn to Arizona after the funeral and would not let my mother see her. My mother wrote to that address for years. The letters came back.
My mother had sewn that passbook into her good coat so it would always be with her, and then she just ran out of time.
Pat is better at the computer than I am. She found Carolyn in two evenings. Carolyn Dowd Hernandez, forty nine, a dental hygienist in Tucson with two grown boys.
I wrote her a real letter. Pat helped me with it. I put in a copy of the obituary and a picture of her mother and mine as girls on a porch swing, which I found in that same envelope.
She called me the day it arrived. She said her father never talked about her mother and died when she was twenty. She said she did not have a single photo of her mother until that morning.
The bank needed paperwork, a lot of it. It took four months. The money went to Carolyn, every penny, with forty some years of interest on it. She used part of it to fly out here in April.
She stayed with me for a week. We went through every photo I had. She has the same chin as my mother.
And the coat? Pat tried to give it back to me that first day. I told her to keep it. She wore it to the airport when we picked up Carolyn, and Carolyn said it looked exactly like one her mom wore in the only memory she has of her.
Pat gave it to her on the spot. Carolyn wore it the whole week, even though it was seventy degrees.