I pried the lid up. It caught, then gave. And I sat down on an upturned five-gallon bucket right there in the middle of his garage, and I did not call out to Brenda in the house, because inside that ammo can was a set of old hand tools, oiled and perfect, wrapped in soft cloth, and a mans gold pocket watch, and a note on top with my name on it. Dale. Just Dale, in Earl blocky hand.
Earl and I never talked. Twenty years of holidays, and maybe we swapped a hundred sentences, and most of those were about the weather or the ballgame. I always figured he did not think much of me. The quiet ones, you never know, and I am quiet too, so the two of us just sat in our quiet across two decades and never once crossed it.
The tools were his fathers. The note said so. Prewar tools, the good kind they do not make anymore, forged steel, worn smooth by three generations of working hands. And the watch was his fathers too. And Earl had set them aside, in an ammo can behind his vise where only a man who worked that bench would ever think to find them, and left them to me.
Dale. You are the only one of them who would know what these are worth, and I do not mean the money. My daddy tools and my daddy watch. You work with your hands, and you respect a thing that is made right, I have watched you do it for twenty years. The rest of them would sell these at the estate sale for ten dollars and never know what they had. You will not. I never was any good at talking. But I was always glad Brenda married a man who would care for the things that matter. These are yours now. Take good care of them, son.
Son. He called me son. Twenty years he barely said good morning to me, and the whole time he had been watching me, and he saw me, really saw me, a fellow craftsman, a man worth leaving his own father tools to, and he never once said it out loud because he could not, no more than I could. Two quiet men, sitting in the same rooms for twenty years, each one sure the other did not care, and all along Earl was planning to hand me the most precious things he owned.
I did call out to Brenda then. I showed her, and I read her the note, and we both cried in that garage, over a father-in-law and a son-in-law who loved and respected each other for twenty years and never managed to say one word of it, until the only way left to say it was an ammo can behind a vise.
I use his daddy tools now, careful, the way they deserve. And I wear the watch on Sundays. And I talk to Earl sometimes, out loud, at that bench, all the things the two of us never got around to saying. Better late, I figure. He would understand. He was the exact same way. That is how I finally know he was my friend the whole time.