To meet the cousin in Ohio she was named with.
I read it three times. Then I called my brother, because he is older and remembers more.
He was quiet. Then he said, Dad had a brother. Uncle Ray. They fell out over the farm in 1957 and never spoke again. Ray moved to Fort Smith. Dad never said his name after that.
I never knew I had an uncle. I certainly never knew I had a cousin.
My brother remembered one more thing. Before the fight, the two brothers had babies the same year, both girls. They named us both after their mother, the grandmother I never met. Margaret Ann. They thought it was sweet. Two little Margaret Anns, one for each son.
Somewhere in Arkansas, a girl with my face and my name had been wondering about me for her whole life, and I never knew she existed.
I called the district back. The secretary, whose name was Judy, figured out the mix up in about an hour. In October, the district finished putting all their old paper records into a computer system. When my cousin requested a copy of her own diploma, the system matched her name and class year against a national address database and mailed it to the wrong Margaret Ann.
To me.
Judy said she was not allowed to give out a phone number. But she said she would call my cousin and give her mine.
My phone rang that night at nine. A woman with a soft Arkansas accent asked if this was Margaret Ann. I said yes. She said, so am I.
We talked for three hours.
She said her father told her about me when she was twelve. He said somewhere up north she had a cousin with the same name, and he was sorry the family was broken. He always hoped she would find me. She wrote that ambition in her senior book in 1974. She tried to look for me a few times over the years, but there are a lot of Margaret Anns in Ohio, and she did not know my married name.
Both of our fathers are gone now. They died without ever making up. It was over forty acres of Arkansas bottomland that got sold in 1961 anyway.
She flew up in November. I picked her up at the Columbus airport, and when she came down the escalator, people actually stopped and stared. Same height. Same nose. Same laugh. She had brought a photo of our grandmother. We look exactly like her.
We spent a week together. We drove out to where my dad is buried, and she laid a flower on his grave. Then in the spring, I went down to Fort Smith and put one on the grave of her father.
She told me to keep the diploma, since it had my name on it anyway. I framed it next to my own.
Two Margaret Anns. One from each son. It only took us seventy years.