His name is Matthew. He was born in 1967. He is, as I would learn over the next forty-eight hours, a recovered alcoholic who has been sober for twenty-one years. When I was two, he was in the worst year of his disease. He was not dangerous, my mother said, but he was not present. He was also, she said, not gentle. Not cruel, she was careful to say — just absent, and brittle, and gone. She left him in the middle of the night when I was twenty-two months old, drove herself and me to her brother's house in Des Moines, and filed for divorce the following week. He did not contest the divorce. He signed away his parental rights in the settlement — which, she admitted, was not something he had to do, but something he agreed to do because she asked him to. And then my mother, my aunt, my uncle, and three other adults in a conspiracy of silence that had held for nearly three decades, decided collectively that a dead father was a kinder story than an absent one. My mother sat on the kitchen stool and she said, "Honey, I thought I was protecting you. I'm so sorry."