“You raised me in the dark, in your mind, for twenty-six years,” I told him.

“Let me take care of the rest of it in the light.”

Chapter 32 — Dinosaur Guard

My father lived with us, in the end, or near enough — a small place two doors down, so he had his own door and we had ours and Auggie could run between them.

Every afternoon Auggie went to his grandfather’s and they did the important work of the young and the old: puzzles, and dinosaurs, and long slow walks to the corner and back.

“Dinosaur guard,” Auggie declared him once, appointing my father the official protector of a shoebox of plastic dinosaurs, and my father took the office with total seriousness.