My father-in-law said maybe a hundred words to me in twenty years. We never fought. There was just always a wall there, and I chalked it up to me not being the son-in-law he had pictured for his Donna. Quiet man. Machinist at the plant here in Marion forty years, then puttered around that garage of his the whole retirement. He passed this winter, quiet, in his chair, with Wheel of Fortune going on the TV. Donna could not bring herself to set foot in his garage, so I told her I would clear it out myself.
That man kept his garage like a pharmacy. Every wrench on its own hook with the outline drawn around it in marker so you would know where it went back. Coffee cans of bolts sorted by size. A John Deere calendar from nineteen ninety-four still on the wall because he liked the picture on it. I went through the whole thing, and I will be honest, I started to like him, going through it, for the first time in twenty years. All that quiet care. I found myself wishing I had tried harder to crack that wall while he was still around to talk to.
Then, back in the corner behind the workbench, there was an old metal cabinet, and the bottom section had a padlock on it. Everything else in that garage sat wide open. Just this one thing, locked, shoved back where you would have to be looking for it. I knocked the lock off with the bolt cutters and pulled the drawer open. And I had to sit down right on his shop stool.
Inside was a toolbox. But not a bought one. He had built it, by hand, from steel, every joint machined and fitted the way only a man of his trade could do, a beautiful thing, and inside it were his own best tools, the good ones, cleaned and oiled and laid in fitted slots he had cut for each one. And riveted to the lid was a little brass plate he had engraved himself.
For my son-in-law. I never learned how to say a thing out loud, so I made it instead. You were good enough for her from the first day. I was just too much of a coward to tell you. Take care of my girl.
My son-in-law. He called me his son on a brass plate he could hand me from the grave, because he could not get the words across a kitchen table.
And under the toolbox was a folder. In it was my whole life. A clipping from the paper when my little business got written up. Photographs of my kids, his grandkids, that I never knew he had. A program from a barbecue cookoff I won at the church, with my name circled. Twenty years of a man I thought did not care for me, quietly keeping every proud thing I ever did.
The wall was never disapproval. It was a shy man who did not have the words and spent twenty years wishing he did, same as me, both of us on opposite sides of a quiet neither of us knew how to cross.
I use his tools now. I built a hook for that toolbox and drew the outline around it in marker, the way he taught me without ever saying a word. Twenty years too late, I finally know my father-in-law. And I would give a great deal for one more hundred words.