Side by side, not face to face
Ray never sits Chet down. "Sitting a person down is for people who want to perform a conversation." He hands him an end of something (a board, a flashlight under the hood, a rope) and the words come out around the work, "almost like they snuck in while you were busy."
The first ten minutes of that summer, Chet holds a board level while an old man planes it flat. He doesn't check his phone once, because his hands are full. "There's nowhere for the gap to open... and it's the most rest I've had in months."
We sit our kids down because that's how adults perform caring: the check-in, the careful voice, "hey bud, sit a sec." It lands like a summons. Chet's father does exactly this, with all the right words, "the one that sounds like it was assembled from a pamphlet on a kitchen table," and it reaches nobody.
Kids open up sideways, over work, while you're both looking at something else.
Over the next eight weeks you're going to do one thing with your kid that needs two sets of hands. A car, a ramp, a smoker, five dinners, a garden bed, a dog, a bike. Tomorrow, on Project day, you'll choose it. Today, just think about it.
Think of three things that would need two sets of hands and that he might actually want to do. His interest, or neither of yours: not your old hobby he's supposed to learn to love.
Three possible projects.