.

peanut butter.

      “I heard that if you put peanut butter on it—” He started painting my hair with peanut butter.

      “Forget the hair.” I whirled at him. “Forget it.” I picked up his nail scissors and cut out the whole wad of hair, gum and peanut butter. I threw it at him.

      “I can’t live with an addict. I don’t want to come home and find you dead in the lotus position.”

      “We’re not living together.”

      “This is already a very unhealthy relationship,” I told him.

      He looked slightly relieved.

      “I mean, it was,” I said. “I’m out.” I spread my hands wide, fingers stretched open.

      Cliff looked down immediately. Then he went to the bedroom. After a second, I followed him. He opened the drawer with all the drugs and paraphernalia. I got suddenly scared, thinking about that little dab of heroin. I started grabbing at his arms, pulling them away from the needles and things. He pushed me away, gathered everything up, and left the room.

      I stood in the hallway and listened to the sounds of a toilet flushing, a hammer against metal, plastic bags rustling, then the door slamming. I went back into his bedroom and lay down on his bed, holding my forehead.

      I live like a bug, I thought. Crawling around, wondering when I’m going to get squashed. This relationship is a bug.

      In a few minutes, he was back in the bedroom before the front door had fallen shut. “You won. It’s gone,” he said. “All of it.”

      I sat up.

      “Poof,” he said.

      AT FIRST there was an element of now what? In fact, I asked Cliff. “Now what?”

      “Well, what did you do with other boyfriends?”

      “I don’t remember,” I said.

      But we tried stuff. I read some trashy novels and got ideas. There’s always the section of the book after he almost loses her the first time and then gets her back, and they do things during those times. Go to dinner, go dancing. Talk about their family lives. So these were the things that Cliff and I did. We talked about the world. We talked about each other. We saw a counselor who once put her hand on Cliff’s knee during a session. We found another counselor and then decided that things were pretty good, so I moved in.

      We mixed his books (War and Strife, Strife and Socialism, Socialism and Revolution) with mine (Wuthering Heights, Lolita, National Velvet). We took the TV set out of the fireplace and built fires out of pinion branches. We made homemade tamales. We watched Santa Fe’s lava sunsets, when the clouds lurk around the east edge of town like ghosts afraid of fire.

      But no matter, he shot up again, of course. It was my twenty-sixth birthday. I had just come home from grocery shopping. He didn’t tell me. He didn’t have to—the way he passed his hand over my face before saying anything, the way his facial expressions appeared one second too late, as if he were following cue cards. I looked up at his face and started to cry.

      I wondered how long he’d been doing this. Months? I had long ago stopped checking the insides of his elbows while he slept. Or he could have been smoking it. It didn’t matter—it didn’t matter. I grabbed his shirt and cried into it, while he just stood there, arms at his sides.

      “I don’t know how to save you,” I said and wiped my nose on his shirt.