Now we are Four

 I can still see us standing in our bridesmaid outfits at her sister’s wedding. Sally looked enough like me for people to confuse us when coming through the receiving line. Enough alike for the secretary in her office to look up at me and say “Oh, you must be Sally’s sister!” I laughed both times. Fast forward four decades. An email arrives from Sally telling me her DNA on Ancestry.com says we are related and that the photos she found of me on Facebook show us looking even more alike than thirty years ago. When I told her I was registered with 23andMe, she sent off her own precious spit and two weeks later we both received emails—on our father’s birthday. You share 25.6% of your DNA. We predict she is your half-sister. How do you take in a ‘new’ sister? One who grew up around the corner from you? Who went to church with you? When we met after the revelation, I sat on the deck watching her talk. A hat and large sunglasses hid all but her lips, cheeks and neck. I shivered to see I could be looking at my father. This is what you do when you find out you have a ‘new’ sister. You look for the familiarities. And you begin to rake over the past. When people see our photos they say “who needs DNA?” I can describe the inside of Sally’s house and can see her mother clearly, sitting in the kitchen after dinner with a drink in her hand, using a plastic device to save her pink fingernails when dialing the phone. What I can’t see, have no memory of, is her mother and my father together, even though they socialized and moved in the same circles for years. Even though there are photos in the family album of them at neighborhood gatherings.I s there a myth about sisters who were unaware they were sisters? There’s that Greek fate thing of course, you can leave town in order not to sleep with your mother but it happens anyway. You can be dipped in a river held by the heel and given great strength, but that un-dipped heel will get you. You can ignore what looks obvious, but it will reappear later. So now we are four: three sisters and a brother. Last fall we got together for lunch down the road from the candy store where my father used to take all four of us for treats after church. When we asked a tourist to take our photo sitting on the bench outside, she held up the cell phone then said “Oh—you’re brothers and sisters.” We smiled and said ‘cheese.’