Family
He cleared out his father’s garage expecting junk. He found a note his father had written to him in 1994.
It had been folded in the bottom of the toolbox for thirty-one years, under the wrenches.
My father was not a man who said things. He was a man who fixed things, which I now understand was the same activity conducted differently, but it took me until I was fifty-two and standing in his garage to work that out.
Two skips and a Saturday
The plan was two skips and a Saturday. Forty years of a man who never threw anything away, and me with a van hired until six.
The toolbox came out last because it was the heaviest thing in there and I already knew what was in it.
Under the wrenches
A sheet of notebook paper folded into quarters, gone soft at the creases the way paper does when it has been folded a long time and never opened.
My name on the outside, in pencil, in his handwriting.
1994
He had dated it. I was twenty-one that year, and that was the year I left and did not speak to him for four years over something I could not now describe accurately if you paid me.
He wrote it a two weeks after I went and put it in the bottom of a toolbox, and then he left it there for the next thirty-one years.
What it said
That he had handled it badly. That he did not know how to say so on a phone. That he would keep the note until he could give it to me properly and that he expected that would be soon.
We had thirty-one years after that. We talked about the car, mostly, and the the ball game.
Why he never gave it to me
I have stopped trying to answer that, because I know the answer and I do not like it. He was waiting for a moment that was right enough, and no moment ever was, and then he ran out of them.
I am fairly sure I would have done the same. I think I am doing the same right now with my own son and I am forty minutes into noticing it.
The toolbox is in my garage
I kept it. The wrenches are still in it and I use them, which he would have preferred to any of this.
The note is in the kitchen drawer. I have written one back. I have not given it to anyone yet, and I am aware of what that means.