And the girls saw it.

That was the part I could not forgive, later, when I added up the whole account — not what his disappointment did to me, but what it did to them.

Children are not fooled by a father’s performance of joy; they read the thing underneath it, the way they read weather.

Ramona, my oldest, had started at five or six to work very hard at being helpful, being good, being no trouble, in the particular anxious way of a child who has sensed she must earn something that ought to have been free.

I had told myself it was just her nature.

I know better now.