For my high school graduation, my father, who left when I was two, sent me a wrist corsage, a chunk of white flowers I didn’t recognize surrounding one red rose. It came in a frosty box, tied with a pink ribbon, and the message on the card read, “Congratulations. Love, Bud.” I wondered how he knew I was graduating and how he’d found me living at my grandmother’s house in Phoenix. She and my mother hated him, and, as far as I knew, hadn’t spoken to him since my parents’ divorce. Growing up, my mother told me he would have made a lousy father so it was a good thing he wasn’t around. “He sees women as either virgins or whores,” she’d said…