It can be waved off.

If you say the true hard thing while you’re both looking at an engine, and it lands wrong, you can pretend you were mostly talking about the engine, and so can he, and the task gives you both an honorable exit that a face-to-face never offers.

The workbench, I came to understand, was not incidental to the friendship; it was the friendship’s whole architecture.

It gave two proud men a way to be intimate while maintaining the fiction that we were only fixing a truck.

We told each other things over that engine that I suspect neither of us had told another living soul — Del told me about the brother he hadn’t spoken to in thirty years, about the drinking he’d quit at forty and still thought about, about a stillborn baby he and Trudy never named; I told him things about Carol’s last months I’d never said aloud — and we told them to the carburetor, technically, both of us keeping our eyes down and our hands moving, and it was the realest talking I have ever done in my life.

Women have this, I gather.