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scorpions with a black light in the cracks of the exterior adobe and in the interior closets in the house and take hikes around rattlesnake dens while skirting the inch-long thorns on the cat-claw bushes. About three o'clock one morning during that trip, when we'd just crossed the Arizona border, Tom pulled the car over to pee. We'd reached the deep, broad, and very white bowl of the Hoover Dam, gleaming like a giant skater's park on the mountaintop. I got out of the car to stretch and watched as my boyfriend hopped onto one of the retaining walls then scrambled to the top of one of the highest barriers, teetering there at the edge of a maybe six-hundred-foot fall to the bottom. I didn't move. I didn't cry out or shout or even breathe, worried that even the slightest air out of my mouth would be wind enough to topple him from the skinny perch and frantic already about whom I'd call after he fell. Weaving and bobbing, Tom unzipped his jeans and a second later sent an arc of yellow urine—glittering a bit under the towering mercury vapor lamps—into the scoop of the dam.
    It occurs to me now to make this episode a pronounced emblem of our marriage. Tom on the edge, whatever edge, while I'm standing back, cautious and often very afraid. As our girls were growing up, he'd often say, "Don't listen to her—she's scared of everything," to my "Back up, you're too close," to my "Leave it alone, it's too dangerous." Repeated and repeated. We had hardly any interest in common, nothing to say to each other except for the distracting chatter about our daughters, how funny they were and how cute.
And now I understand: soon after Amanda's birth Tom started to become irrelevant to me, each subsequent child made him matter less. I had daughters to love, to mold, to adore, to bring through childhood as I wanted. This boy-man's antics were in my way.
    As for Tom, he didn't like that I was gone so much after Mollie had finished nursing and I had begun to take classes and get into some paid work of my own. Mostly he didn't like that I had new friends who had little to do with him. During this year, the last of our marriage, Tom often fled to the ranch, appearing at home every few days to argue with me again about our lack of money, my lack of concern and care for him. By then, I was done with my husband, done with our nattering fights that had no beginnings or ends but looped one into the other until they were a dissonant buzz around my head. As if the marriage were a fuel-dense forest on fire, my attitude was
let it burn.
It was the dawn of the nineties and I was the cliché of the dawning-nineties woman—sure I could leave my husband and get it all, have it all, whatever "it all" was.

    The day I moved us out of our house, I did so in secret. Tom was off at the ranch for the day, and an hour after he'd left, I'd jammed every inch of our van with the girls' belongings and mine. I drove both giddy and scared a few miles toward the bone-dry river and, at the apartment complex, turned into the parking-lot slip—number 6. But before I'd even yanked the car's emergency brake, I spotted him—Tom—sitting on the front porch of my new apartment. I still don't know how he found out where I planned to live, but he had. For a few seconds I stayed in my seat, heat rising into my face and bursting out the top of my head while the air conditioner blew one cold line across my sweaty neck. I yanked the van into reverse, ready to pull out of the spot, ready to drive down the street to find another apartment to rent. I felt my husband's smugness through the metal and windshield of our family's car—if his message was that he could always find me if he wanted to, I got it. And now I had to run again.
    Then I remembered the money—the thousands of dollars my parents had given me for the deposit. The landlord had told me
that once I'd accepted the keys, the sum was nonrefundable. The money is what got me to turn off the car, to