When I turned eighteen, I stopped trying to track him down. I was on my way to university, eager to leave the sadness of childhood behind, and I had the sense that these visits were too much for my father too. So, in the way of lonely people, we let each other go. In the last note he wrote me, postmarked Coober Pedy, he said with resignation that he had expected this day would come. No fight left in my father, then. You’ve always been your mother’s daughter, it read.
