My father disappeared when I was young.

It was the only tragedy of my childhood,

sort of news that spread like a disease through the small town where I lived.

There was more than one teacher who stuttered to halt on my last name

and looked at me with their eyes overflowing with sympathy,

or they'd pulled me aside to tell me how good of a man he was.

I'm not certain exactly how old I was because my mother refused to speak of him at all unless she was drunk to hell and back.

Even then, her words barely made sense. I was small enough, though, that the only thing I remember of him is the warmth of his voice and a slice of a smile.

He lived in a mansion of a house.

By my father's salary as a professor, but mostly by my mother's trust fund.

My parents had been planning on filling it up with a whole host of children, but just my mother and I, all the empty space was terrifying.

I had nightmares as a teenager about walking into the abandoned corridors of my house and never finding my way back to that small pocket of rooms that we maintained as our living space.

My father was a professor, one of architecture at a prestigious university.

The sort of school that everyone recognizes by name, and he drove an hour to work every day

in an hour home.

My mother and his friends tried to convince him to move to the city, but he said that he

preferred the slowness and solitude of a more rural life.

It was kind to a fault.

Always ready with a joke.

In a crisis, he always knew what to do.

I know this because in the years after his disappearance, I would regularly get accosted by strangers, held captive while they told me long-winded stories about him.

I left as soon as I could.

...