Chapter 25 — The Meeting

My father met Auggie a month later, when he was strong enough to travel, in the small bright apartment I had made for the three of us.

I had been nervous about it — a frail old man, an exuberant six-year-old, all that history in the room.

I need not have been.

Auggie walked up to the wheelchair, studied my father with his usual seriousness, and announced, “Mommy says you’re the nicest person she ever knew.” My father laughed — a real laugh, the first I had heard from him — and said, “Well.

Your mommy is the reason I’m here to meet you.” And Auggie, satisfied, climbed up into his lap with the total trust of a child who has never been given a reason not to trust, and my father held his grandson and wept, and I had to leave the room so they would not see me do the same.