I set my pry bar down real slow, because down in that chamber under the pavers, dry and sealed against the weather, was a cedar chest, and the cedar chest was full of letters, dozens of them, each one in an envelope with a childs name and words like On your wedding day, and On the day you become a father.
I sat back on my heels in that hole and I knew I was looking at something a dying mother made.
We pieced it together later. A woman named Eleanor, mother of three, had been given a year to live back in the nineteen nineties. She spent that year writing letters to her children for every milestone she knew she would miss. Her husband sealed them in the chest and built the chamber under the patio, where the family grilled and sat together all summer, so that she would always be right there under them. He meant to give the letters out as the years came. But he died himself, suddenly, only a few years after she did, before he told a single one of the children where the letters were.
So the letters waited in the ground under a patio, under twenty-some summers of cookouts and birthdays, for somebody to pull up a hollow-sounding paver.
She could not stay for her childrens weddings. So she wrote her way there, and buried the letters where the family would always be sitting right on top of her love.
The young couple who hired me did not keep a thing. We used the names on the envelopes and a little help from the county to find Eleanors three children, grown now, scattered across the country, who had spent their whole adult lives believing their mother left them nothing but a few photographs.
They came to the house, all three. We handed them the chest. The oldest opened the one marked On your wedding day, thirty years after her wedding, and read her mothers handwriting for the first time since she was a girl.
I relaid that patio better than I found it. The couple kept the chamber empty and dry under a paver you can lift, because they said a place that held something that good should never just be filled back in with gravel.