His new move was control-print.

The purple walls, the red walls, the Arizona fever dream of the house I escaped to with Mary after he went off with P.R. That bathroom with the perfectly calibrated showerhead, the weird feeling of reaching in and having to touch a jewel-encrusted wall while looking for the light switch in order to take a pee during Nurse Jackie binges, the parched yard with the sporadically placed plants and the BEWARE OF SNAKES signs that seemed metaphorical, though they weren’t. The rattlesnake on the road, stretched across the other lane, and how the next day we were afraid it would still be there smashed flat, and thankfully it wasn’t, and that mound of petroglyph rocks that had its own THIS IS A SNAKE AREA sign. But that vacation house is what I mean to remember, the wild walls and the big, hideous, mood-flattening painting that I had to hide so it wouldn’t disrupt my dreams, how Alice calls every morning on her way to school in New Jersey to say, “Honey, how are you?” and what a nice last name Dark is. And how I walk around and around that yard, nervous energy, soaking up the sporadic-ness of the planted cactuses and the little nubs here and there of the useless irrigation system poking through, and the hot tub we aren’t actually insane enough to use, and then my favorite part—the Flintstone steps leading to the roof, where the whole desert becomes the theater and us the audience, that first taste of my end-of-day beer, which is always the moment when the anxiety starts to leach out of me, like sweat cooling on the skin. Sitting with Mary in those chairs with our tortilla chips and cold beer and the incredible Barbara Kingsolver scribble of mountains on either side of us, the evening train in the distance running on the tracks, so many cars, endless, desert-Southwest-long, a Joni Mitchell train, with its brakes complaining. I used to count lovers like railroad cars, I counted them on my side. Lately I don’t count on nothing, I just let things slide. I’ve never let anything slide in my life, that’s the sad truth. But our roof, with the scrawl of mountains and the blue mist sometimes and the vivid pink and coral stripes, the crispness of the air and the joy of listening to Mary’s thoughts, that particular joy of knowing another person’s past and present so completely.