Inside that trailer, once my eyes adjusted, there was a small writing desk, and on it, arranged with great care, a photograph of a young woman I did not recognize, a stack of letters tied in ribbon, and a single dried flower under glass. It was a shrine to a love no one in the family had ever heard of.
I stood in that hot doorway, feeling I had stepped into my uncles most private heart.
The old man everyone thought had never loved, never married, never had anyone, had carried a great lost love his entire life. Her name, the letters told me, was Alice.
Sixty years ago, before he ever came to the desert, my uncle had loved a woman named Alice, and something had torn them apart, distance or family or bad timing, and he had never gotten over her, never loved another, and had spent his solitary desert life keeping her memory alive.
Her letters were beautiful, full of a young love that never got its chance. And his journals, decades of them, returned again and again to Alice, wondering where she was, whether she was happy, whether she ever thought of him.
His letter to me said: You asked me once, when you were young, why I never married. I could not tell you then. Her name was Alice, and I loved her, and I lost her, and no one ever measured up. I have wondered my whole life what became of her. I am too old and too proud to find out now. But maybe you could. If she lives, tell her an old man never stopped loving her. Love, your uncle.
I could not leave a dying mans last wish unanswered.
I took the name and the old addresses from the letters, and I searched. It took time, but I found her. Alice was alive, in her eighties, in a little town in Oregon. And when I told her, gently, who my uncle was, she began to cry, because she had never forgotten him either.
She had wondered about him her whole life, the same as he had wondered about her. Sixty years, both of them carrying the same lost love, never knowing the other still cared.
My uncle had passed before I could reunite them in life. But I drove to Alice, and I gave her his letters and his journals and the news that he had loved her to the very end.
She held his letters to her chest and thanked me through her tears. She said she could finally rest, knowing. She asked to be told where he was buried, so she could visit, and she did, an old woman laying flowers for the love of her youth.
Some inheritance, my cousin had said. It turned out to be a sixty-year love story, finally given its ending. My uncle loved one woman his whole life. I got to tell her so. Two old hearts, apart for sixty years, joined at last by a stranger and a bundle of letters. Love like that does not die. It just waits for someone to carry it home.