Because down in that joist bay, sitting on a square of plywood somebody had cut to fit, was a cigar box. And across the lid, in pencil, in the handwriting of a boy maybe ten years old, it said Property of Billy Shaffer. KEEP OUT. This means you, Ronnie.
I laughed out loud. I could not help it. I called Dale in from the kitchen and showed him, and he laughed too.
Then he opened it, and we both quit laughing.
Baseball cards. A couple hundred of them, sorted by team and held in stacks with rubber bands that had gone brittle and snapped. Pirates, Dodgers, Yankees, Giants. All of them from 1951 and 1952. And right on top of the Yankees stack, in near perfect shape, was a 1952 card of a young center fielder named Mickey Mantle.
I am no collector. But I know enough to know what that card is. Dale looked it up on his phone, and then he had to sit down on the floor I had just sanded.
I told him the truth. It was his house, and whatever was under his floor was his. Nobody would ever say different. Dale thought about it for a minute and then said he wanted to find Billy.
It was not hard. Kingwood is a small town. The lady at the county clerk office remembered the Shaffers, and she knew Billy was still living, eighty-three years old, in a retirement place up in Morgantown.
We drove up there together that Saturday. Dale carried the box in his lap the whole way.
Billy was sharp as a tack. When Dale set that cigar box on his table, the old man read the lid, and he started laughing so hard the nurse came in to check on him. Ronnie was his big brother. Their mother had thrown out a whole shoebox of Ronnie cards one spring cleaning, calling it junk, and Billy was not about to let that happen to his. So he pried up a board and hid them. The family moved to Maryland in 1956 in a hurry when his dad got a new job, and he forgot all about it.
Then he picked up the Mantle. He held it by the edges the way a boy does, and for about a minute he was not eighty-three anymore.
Billy made Dale take half of whatever the collection sold for. Dale fought him on it and lost. Ronnie passed years ago, but his grandsons got the Dodgers stack, which Billy said was only fair after what their great-grandmother did.
As we were leaving, Billy called me back to his table. He handed me one card out of the Pirates stack, some backup catcher nobody ever heard of. He said every good job deserves a tip.
It is framed on the wall of my shop.
Twenty-three years sanding floors. That is the first one I ever opened that still had a kid living under it.