Inside the plastic was a small wooden box. Inside the box was a wedding cake topper. A bride and groom in white porcelain, standing under a little arch of silk flowers gone ivory with age. Beside it, two empty ring boxes, and a photograph.
The photo showed a young couple standing at the edge of this exact pool. She was in a short white dress with a veil. He was in a narrow black suit. Behind them, the diving board I had just torn out. On the back, in blue ink, it said, Bob and Linda, married right here, June 8, 1968. See you at fifty.
Under the photo was a folded note. It said, we buried our topper under the deep end on our wedding day. We promised we would dig it up on our fiftieth and dance at this pool again.
I called the family out. The Hendersons had bought the place in the spring with three kids and a golden retriever. The mom, Sarah, read the note twice. She said, did they make it? Did they make fifty?
Somebody had buried a promise under the deep end, and nobody ever came back to dig it up.
Sarah found out that night. The previous owner, the one who let the pool go, was named Robert Keller. He had moved into a nursing home in 2015 after a stroke. Linda had passed away in 2016. Two years short of fifty.
Robert was still living. He was eighty three.
Sarah called the nursing home. She asked if she could bring something to Mr. Keller. They said he did not get many visitors.
She went that Sunday. She took her oldest daughter, who is sixteen. She took the box.
She told me later that Robert did not say anything at first. He held the topper in his lap, turning it over and over. Then he said, she wanted to dig it up so bad. We kept saying next summer. Then I got sick.
He cried. Sarah cried. The nurse who came in to check on him cried.
Then Robert asked if the pool still worked.
Sarah said it would in about three weeks.
I finished the deck in two. I reset that section of tile the right way, bonded down, and I set one small blue tile in the middle of it with the date. June 8, 1968.
In July, the Hendersons brought Robert home to his old backyard for an afternoon. His son drove him. They set up a chair right at the edge of the deep end, next to the blue tile. The kids swam. Somebody put on an old record.
Sarah told me that near the end of the afternoon, Robert asked his son to help him stand up. He held the cake topper in one hand and the arm of his son with the other, and he swayed back and forth by that pool to one slow song, all by himself.
He was dancing with her. Everybody knew it.
Twenty six years around pools. I have never cried on a job site before that.