The Tools That Came Home Early

I think about the shop sometimes. Brock went back to his torque converter that afternoon like nothing had happened, and he never asked anybody to remember what he put in. Jeremy bought his scope in the spring.

Landon turned 16 on December 12, a Saturday.

It was cold and gray, no snow yet. We were in the yard by seven-thirty: Teri in her robe, Leann and me, Verle in a clean pair of coveralls he had put on special, and Brock, who had asked if he could come. Nobody else. Teri had made coffee cake, and nobody ate it.

She took the keys out of the kitchen drawer and put them in his hand. They were Heath’s keys, on a ring with the brass tag from Haldane Auto in Barton, where he’d bought it used in 2004, and a plastic fob shaped like a wrench.

“Is the box mine now?” Landon asked.

“It’s all yours,” Teri said. “Both.”

He looked at the keys. Then he looked at the shed.

“Can I go in by myself?”

Nobody said a word against it. I went around to the side of the shed to straighten the hose reel, so I would be close if he wanted someone, and so I could see through the open door without looking like I was looking.

He sat down on an upturned five-gallon bucket in front of the chest. He opened the top drawer all the way. He picked the card up off the foam liner and unfolded it.

He read it standing, and then sitting, and then standing again. It had four lines on it, maybe five. I could see that much from where I was. I have never been told what they said. I never asked, and he never offered, and I would not trade the not knowing for anything.

He folded the card along its old crease and put it in the pocket of his shirt.

Then he shut the drawer, walked out of the shed past me, and crossed the yard to the Ford.

He opened the driver’s door and got in. He sat there with the keys in his hand and did not start it. After a moment he slid down across the bench seat and put his head under the dash, with his feet still out the door, reaching up where the steering column meets the firewall.

I heard a piece of tape rip.

When he sat up he had something in his hand, and a strip of black electrical tape was still stuck to it.

It was a ten millimeter combination wrench, a Snap-on, the box end worn bright from years of a thumb. His father had taped it up under the dash on the one side of that truck where no mechanic would look and no man washing a cab would reach. Reuben Haldane had washed that cab twice and never found it.

Landon got out. He carried it across the yard to the shed with the tape still on, and I stepped aside to let him by.

He stood at the pegboard. He peeled the tape off with his thumbnail and pressed it into a ball and put the ball in his pocket. Then he hung the wrench on the two hooks over the one empty outline.

It fit the black line without being turned.