Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. Vol. 40, No. 6, June, 1995

He wasn’t really her uncle. He was either her grandmother’s cousin’s son or her step-grandmother’s brother’s nephew, something like that, but he was known as Uncle Willis by everyone in her family so that’s what she called him, too. Her Great-aunt Louise once drew her a diagram of relationships, and she could reason it out to the extent that uncles and aunts had to be Mom or Dad’s brothers or sisters while children of her parents’ siblings were her cousins, but after that, when it got to second cousin once removed and all, she was completely out of it, and besides her folks were only children so it ended right there with her. Funny thing though, now she had relatives she’d never even heard of until Uncle Willis made her his heir. Then the distant, very distant (sixth or seventh twice removed?) cousins began to come out of the woodwork and look sad-eyed at the coffin. All they got out of that was a wide-eyed stare and a weak handshake; if they expected anything else they had the wrong girl.

She and her mother had lived in Uncle Willis’s house when she was young. Her father had vanished somewhere into the wild blue yonder (he’d been a pilot in the Air Force, quite dashing if you go by the old snapshots) before she was a year old, and Uncle Willis took pity on them, so her mother said, and gave them a roof over their heads, said that with moistened eyes and a dabbing of the nose with a Kleenex, she talked like that, very dramatic was her mother. They lived there until she was in her early teens. She never thought much about Uncle Willis until she got old enough to understand that sometimes things that look like they mean one thing really mean some other thing, and it was right about then that he turned generous and began doing nice things for her, that would be when she got to be ten or so.

Until then Uncle Willis was just part of the scenery like the picture of the Indian chief on horseback that hung in the hallway, he wasn’t around all the time because he worked for the railroad and was in residence only on his week off, which came every five weeks or so. One time he came home with vacation plans in mind, would somebody like to take a trip to the seashore, he had an extra week coming and railroad passes, and her mother said, “Oh my, just imagine,” and she poked her and she said, “Me? Do you mean me, Uncle Willis?” whereupon he said she could come along if she liked.

Oooh, said her mother. “Isn’t that nice of Uncle Willis?” She poked her again. “Tell Uncle Willis thank you very much. Tell him you certainly would like to go.”

Of course she liked, there was a big world out there and she hadn’t seen any of it. The next year it was the mountains and after that a world’s fair, wasn’t it nice of Uncle Willis, her mother kept saying, but by age thirteen she was just a little more worldly (all that travel broadens one, they say, must be true), so she said yeah, sure, and after that she kept her distance. Her mother wondered why, but she never told her, merely said she preferred to stay home with her friends, and after awhile Uncle Willis stopped inviting and Mother stopped asking. Her mother was a very sweet, very simple person who eventually met a very sweet, very simple man and they got married and the three of them moved to a rental duplex where they all lived fairly happily ever after.

In due time she all but forgot Uncle Willis. In due time he died and left everything he possessed to her. So what did she get for the hugs and the touches and the eventual rejection? She got the house she’d lived in as a child (much in need of repair by now, it seemed much smaller than she remembered, and the Indian picture had faded to yellows and blues), a bit of money (not a heck of a lot) in a savings account, and the Betamax.

The furnishings that came with the house were mostly familiar, the same sofa looking every year of its age, the same well-used beds and scratched tables and almost-springless chairs, but one modem touch was the video recorder and its television. She could imagine Uncle Willis sitting in front of the TV watching films, and she was briefly rather pleased for him because she had swallowed a little guilt pill when she saw how drab his life had been, visualized his loneliness. When it came to loneliness, she knew the way, and she was not strictly from the freezer.

She’d sell the house, she decided, for whatever she could get and give the furniture to the Salvation Army but keep the money and the VCR. It wasn’t until she turned it on that she realized it was a Betamax, and she thought, boy, that was just like Uncle Willis to leave her a video recorder that was passe, they didn’t make Beta tapes any more, Beta bet on the wrong system and lost so she was stuck with a VCR that she couldn’t use. Par for the course for Didi Becker.