It was a coffee can. A big one, the old three pound kind, with the label long since rusted off. It was heavy. When I shook it gently, it rustled like leaves.
I called the couple in from the kitchen. Their names were Megan and Josh, and they had been married eleven weeks. They bought the house because the dining room had a bay window Megan fell in love with the first time she saw it.
Josh pried off the lid. Inside were little folded papers. Hundreds of them. Each one the size of an index card, folded twice. Josh unfolded the one on top.
It said, June 14, 1974. Twenty years. You still step on my feet when we dance. I would not trade a single bruise. Love, Frank.
Megan unfolded the next one. June 14, 1974. Twenty years. You still hum when you think I cannot hear. I always can. Love, Dottie.
They went back to 1955. Two notes every June, one from each of them, every single year. The last pair was from 2016. Sixty two years. Frank had written, I cannot dance anymore, but I would still pick you for every song. Dottie had written, you were worth every one of them.
Every anniversary for sixty two years, two people had pulled up their own floor to tell each other they would do it all again.
That was why the screws were worn bright. They had opened it once a year, every year, since before I was born.
Megan was crying. Josh was pretending not to.
The house had been sold by an estate. It took Megan two phone calls to find the family. Frank and Dottie Novak had both passed in 2017, three months apart. Their grandson, a high school band teacher named Adam, lived twenty minutes away in Nelsonville.
Adam came over that Saturday. He sat on the subfloor in the dining room with the can in his lap and read them all, one at a time, for three hours. Megan made him coffee. He told us Frank and Dottie met at a dance in that very room, at a house party in 1953. The owners back then pushed the table against the wall. Frank bought the house a few years later because it was where he met her.
He said the floor was their secret. Even their kids never knew.
Adam asked if we would put the can back.
So I laid the new hardwood right over that square, but I made it a panel that lifts, just like theirs. Nobody would ever know it was there unless they knew.
On their first anniversary, Megan and Josh lifted the panel together. They each wrote a note and put it in the can, on top of all the others. Then they danced in the dining room.
Josh stepped on her feet. She told me so herself.
Twenty years laying floors. That is the only one I ever built to be pulled up again.