Wrapped in a plastic bread bag inside that dry chamber was a spiral notebook. Blue cover, water stained on the corners, but dry inside. The first page said, Mr. Webb Swim Lessons, Free, All Kids Welcome, 1971.
Every page after that was a list of names. Names of kids, with ages, and a little check mark beside each one. Some had notes. Scared of deep end. Floats like a cork. Learned in one day. The last entry was dated August 1994.
There were over six hundred names in that notebook.
I called the couple out to the pool. Kelsey and Jordan had bought the place in March. They knew the old man who lived there before had died in the spring, but that was all.
I knew who Mr. Webb was. Everybody over forty in Ravenswood knew who Mr. Webb was.
He worked at the aluminum plant for thirty years. And every summer, after his shift, he opened his backyard pool to any kid in town who could not swim. No charge. Some summers there were twenty kids in that water at once. He said the river took too many children every year, and he was not going to let it take any more from his town.
I turned the pages slowly. Then I stopped.
June 1983. My name. Age seven. And beside it, in his handwriting, one note. Stubborn. Will be fine.
I had been working in that pool for three days before I realized I learned to swim in it.
I had forgotten. I really had. I remembered a big man with a whistle and a sunburned bald head, and a pool that seemed as big as a lake. I did not remember whose yard it was.
Kelsey asked me why he would hide the notebook. I said I did not know. Maybe he wanted it to stay with the pool. Maybe he just did not want to throw it away.
Jordan had an idea. He posted a photo of the first page on the town Facebook group. He asked if anyone remembered Mr. Webb.
By that night there were three hundred comments. People found their own names in the photos Jordan posted of the pages. A man who is now a fire captain. A woman who coaches the high school swim team. A retired Coast Guard officer who said Mr. Webb was the reason he ever went near water.
I finished the plumbing in two weeks. The pool filled clear as glass.
On the Fourth of July, Kelsey and Jordan opened the backyard to anyone who ever learned to swim there. Almost two hundred people came. Grown men and women in their forties and fifties, some with their own grandkids. There was a long line to see the notebook on the patio table.
At noon, the swim coach blew a whistle. Everybody who learned from Mr. Webb got in the water at once.
I got in too.
Eighteen years I have been working on pools. That was the first time I ever swam in one I fixed.