"We can start without her. What do you say, Sammy?" Enrico asked her.
"Can Daddy come too?" she asked, still unsure about going down there.
"Is he brave enough?" Enrico asked.
"Daddy is brave," Sammy assured him. "He's brave and big and strong."
"OK then. You, me and your dad," Enrico said to her and offered her his hand.
"OK. I'm brave too," she said. "Hold my hand, Daddy."
With all of them holding hands like that, going down the narrow stairs was kind of a challenge, but they made it. The extra lights made the place less scary, but Sammy was still uneasy at first.
"How about if I carry you so you can have a look around from up high?" Mitch asked her.
Sammy liked that idea a lot and hung around his neck, feeling safe while peering around at everything. Soon enough her curiosity got the better of her, and she scrambled down to explore. She was finding all sorts of treasures with Enrico.
While she was looking at an old sepia photo of a group of ladies all wearing feathered hats, Mitch asked Enrico, "So is there a method to this madness?"
"There's some stuff here that's obviously just trash. I'm going to trash the trash and let my grandmother and Sammy decide about the rest," he said.
"Sammy is making decisions?" Mitch said.
"Sure. She knows what's what." Enrico's phone chimed with a text. "Grandma is on her way," Enrico announced and Sammy celebrated.
Mitch took a trash bag to that room that might have been a bomb shelter. As he got all the ancient cans of food out of there, he could hear Enrico asking Sammy's expert opinion on various stuff he discovered. To think she had been scared to come down here, and now she couldn't get enough of the treasure hunt.
Not long after, Mrs. Del Rio's high-heeled shoes could be heard clicking down the basement stairs.
"Everything is coming along real nice up there and soon we'll have this basement cleaned up too," she said.
Sammy ran over to show her the picture she found of the ladies with hats, and Mrs. Del Rio told her she could keep it.
"Just don't let her keep everything she finds," Mitch implored her.
"She's a good kid and you do good work," she said to him. "Just today someone asked me to see this place and the house isn't even on the market. Not that seeing it would have done him much good. I saw his suit, his shoes and his car, and he couldn't afford it."
"But you'll be putting it on the market soon, right?" Mitch said and felt a pang of sorrow at the thought of leaving.
"I'm in no rush. I'll give you plenty of time to fix it up right," Mrs. Del Rio assured him, though when they had first talked about the renovation, she made it seem like she was in a hurry.
Right now she was more interested in joining Enrico and Sammy as they picked through the jumble of stuff down there. Mitch hauled up one box of old books and came back to find them digging up old clothes and magazines to fill two more boxes.
"I found a treasure," Sammy said in an awed whisper. In her cupped hands, she held a teacup with a handle in the shape of a butterfly.
"That was made for you," Enrico said then turned to his grandmother while glancing up at Mitch. "It's all hers, right?"
"That sweet baby girl can have anything she wants in the whole wide world," Mrs. Del Rio said.
"That means she can have the teacup," Enrico translated for Mitch.
But there was no end to the treasures Sammy found. She held up a small, vintage, oilcan. It had a spout and a picture of a shepherd girl and a sheep on it.
"Is it for watering flowers?" Sammy asked.
"I guess it can be for that," Enrico said. "Grandma wants to plant lots of flowers in the garden. That will come in handy."
Next was a brass lamp in the shape of an elephant. Sammy liked that too. Then a ceramic box decorated with lilies and a matching bowl.
