The Stranger at the Back of the Funeral
The Toolbox Goes West
It was the red metal socket set. The case was dented in three places and the paint had worn through to bare steel along the handle, but when Lyle opened the latches, every socket sat in its slot, clean and lightly oiled, arranged from smallest to largest.
“It’s the first thing I ever owned that nobody could take from me,” he said. “I’ve rebuilt a thousand engines with it. I wanted him to have it back.”
Renata ran her fingers over the sockets. She thought of the pegboard in her father’s garage, every tool inside its black outline, nothing ever missing.
“I think he’d want you to keep it,” she said. “But I have an idea. Can you come by the house?”
Curtis was in the garage when they pulled into the driveway, standing in front of the pegboard with his hands in his jacket pockets as if he had been there for a while. He turned when he heard the truck. For a moment he and Lyle simply looked at each other across the gravel. Then Curtis walked over and held out his hand.
“I sat in the truck,” Curtis said. “One night that winter. I was nine. I never knew it was you in there.”
Lyle took his hand and held it. “He talked about you. Said you were going to be strong as an ox. Said you could already lift a tire by yourself.”
Curtis laughed, a short surprised sound, and looked away quickly.
Inside the garage, Renata told them both what she had been thinking since the cemetery. Their father had left behind hundreds of tools. Wrenches, jacks, pullers, gauges, a rolling toolbox with eleven drawers, a hydraulic press he had rebuilt himself. Neither she nor Curtis would ever use most of it. Curtis had his own tools. Renata lived in a condo in Columbus with one kitchen drawer that held a hammer and two screwdrivers.
“Your apprenticeship program,” she said to Lyle. “The kids you take in. How many tools do they have when they start?”
Lyle blinked. “Usually nothing. I loan them mine till they can buy their own. Takes a while.”
Renata looked at Curtis. Curtis looked at the pegboard for a long moment, at the black outlines their father had drawn so carefully. Then he nodded.
It took them most of the afternoon to load Lyle’s truck. They worked mostly in silence, the three of them, wrapping wrenches in old towels and sliding the rolling toolbox up a plank into the bed. Dana came by with the boys around three, and Curtis introduced Lyle simply as “a friend of Dad’s,” and Renata felt the word land in her chest. Friend. The word on the funeral program. Curtis had been right after all.
When they were done, the pegboard was nearly bare, a wall of empty black outlines. Renata had expected it to look sad. Instead, it looked like something had been set loose.
Curtis kept one thing: the torque wrench from the photograph, which Lyle insisted on, saying it belonged with family. Renata kept one thing too, though not for long.
Standing beside the loaded truck as the sun went down, she took the brass key on its red string out of her coat pocket and pressed it into Lyle’s palm, folding his scarred fingers over it.
“For your side door,” she said. “He’d want somebody using it.”
Lyle looked at the key for a long time. Then he slipped it into his own pocket and kept his hand there, holding it, the way she guessed he had held it at fourteen, at sixteen, at eighteen.
“There’s a cot in my break room right now,” he said. “Kid named Marcus. Seventeen. He doesn’t know I know he doesn’t have anywhere else to go. I just leave the door open.”
“Does he know about my dad?”
“He will,” Lyle said. “I’m going to tell him the whole story when I get home. I think I’m finally allowed to.”
