I am the daughter of a “holiday man,” a term my grandmother used to describe three generations of our family’s absentee fathers who, like clockwork, would return around Christmas before disappearing again to whereabouts unknown.

Back when I was coming-of-age and grappling with the absence of my own father, my grandfather, a former holiday man, was trying to pay his penance. Unknown to his second wife, he had begun spending a lot of time each week at our house near the bayou where my grandmother, mother and I lived. A gardener, he planted his remorse in the soil where it blossomed into a lemon tree and then a fig tree, and then a plum, orange, peach and apple, all lined up in a colored row behind our garage.

“They always come back,” my mother said as my grandfather gardened. “They always realize their wrongs.”

But I was far more concerned about the origin of what appeared to me to be a disturbing and seemingly unavoidable pattern in choosing the wrong men.