He had chosen well in the moral sense, the only sense that ultimately matters, while my father imagined he was praising a choice made in the mercenary one.

Two men stood in that chapel doorway, using the same three words, meaning entirely opposite things by them, and only one of them understood that a wedding is not a transaction.

The tragedy of my parents is contained in that small misunderstanding: they genuinely could not tell the difference between choosing well and choosing profitably, and they went to their lonely later years still not understanding why the whole family recoiled from what they had thought was simple good planning.

Chapter 10 — The Yellow House