“It’s okay.” I went over and stood on the other side of the observation point. The ice was far away from us. I tried to estimate its size. Two miles? Three? I was not good at guessing these things at all. Maybe it was twenty, maybe it wasn’t even half. I felt still and very small, like how everyone feels in the presence of beauty. If I brought children here one day, they would not see this. It would still be beautiful. I would find myself trying to tell them that something was missing, and then unable to describe why it should be so important to see a particular triangle of ice. Because you never can, now. Now you couldn’t if you wanted to. I was twenty-two. I was a baby. There was the glacier that had inched its long slow body over the surface of the earth, and shaped stone, and settled here in Montana. I would outlive it.

Harry and I were both dry-eyed when we got back to the car. But I did hold her, sitting in my lap, her body clutched into mine, tight and awkward, her pulse pounding against my skin at several points. And not there, where it felt sacrilegious, but a little farther down the mountain, I did kiss her, and she did kiss me back, and it did taste like something old that wasn’t gone yet, and we probably would have had sex if we weren’t both so cold by then, but we were. So we kept driving.

* * *

When we came down off the mountain, we ordered slices of huckleberry pie at a restaurant with a touristy wooden sign out front. “Huckleberry Pie! Huckleberry Shakes! Huckleberry Ice Cream! Huckleberry Jam!” It had a stuffed bear reared up in the middle of the dining area. There was a fake fire in a fake-stone fireplace.

Harry hadn’t said much since she’d climbed out of my lap, just a soft, “God, please,” when I’d pointed out the restaurant’s sign. She hadn’t cried again, that I could tell, but she was drawn into herself, her purplish lip caught between her teeth, one hand buried in her little canvas purse, though we’d left Emily Dickinson sleeping in her cage. I felt tender toward her, with shared emotion, with the knowledge that I’d miss her very much. But nothing I could think to say felt right for the moment. Harry’s other hand pushed a bite of her pie around her plate with her fork. It was hot. And really good, touristy or not. It tasted like the cobblers my mom made sometimes when I was little, which meant it tasted like sitting at the gray-marble-topped kitchen island with the chandelier my mom always hit her head on, the lights off in the rest of the house, and the sound of whipped cream hissing out of a can.

Also like huckleberries. Tart and sweet.