Down in the muck at the very bottom of the deep end, weighted with a chunk of concrete, was a bronze plaque, green with ten years of black water, and set on top of it, in a little waterproof case, a wedding ring. I dropped the hose and climbed right back out, not from fear, but because I had just understood the whole sad story, and I needed a second in the sun.
The plaque had a name on it, and two dates, and one line. He loved this water.
Ten years ago, in that pool, a man died. The previous owner husband, I found out later, a strong swimmer, taken by a heart attack one ordinary afternoon in the water he loved, gone before anyone could reach him. His widow could not drain that pool and she could not swim in it and she could not look at it. But before she covered it over for good and sold the house to get away from the memory, she did one last thing. She lowered a bronze plaque and his wedding ring to the very bottom, to the deepest part, where he had loved to be, and she left him a marker in the one place she could never bring herself to disturb again.
She did not sell the house to get away from anything sinister. She sold it to get away from the deep end of a swimming pool, and the worst afternoon of her life, and the water that had taken the man she loved.
I could not leave that ring at the bottom of a pool I was about to scrub and fill and hand to a stranger, so I did the only decent thing, and I set out to find the widow who put it there.
It took some doing, real-estate records and a few phone calls, but I found her, an older woman now, living across town. And when I called and told her I was cleaning out the old pool and I had found her husband ring, she went quiet on the phone for a long, long time. She thought it was gone forever, given back to the water on purpose, and she had made her peace with that. She never dreamed she would hold it again.
I drove it over and put it in her hand. She cried, and then she laughed a little, and she told me about him, the strong swimmer, the man who loved the water, and for a while that ring was not a thing at the bottom of a sad pool anymore. It was just her husband, come home.
She kept the ring. She told me to fill the pool and let the new family have their summers in it, and to tell them nothing, because a pool should be for joy, and hers had held enough sorrow. So the new lady got her pool back, blue and clean, and never knew. And a widow got her husband ring back after ten years underwater. I have drained a lot of ugly pools in this business. That is the only one that ever handed me something holy at the bottom.