Can you hold this while the glue dries?”

They finished the bridge near sunset.

It wasn’t perfectly straight, and one support leaned slightly to the left.

But when Tommy placed it between the two houses he’d drawn on cardboard, it held.

After Mark left, my son ran his finger along the railing and smiled.

“It’s stronger than it looks,” he said.

I thought about the sentence long after he went to sleep.

PART 20