The gas station attendant raps on the window.

“How you paying, mister?” he asks when Ashif rolls down the window.

Ashif can’t answer. Something inside him cracks like ice across a frozen lake, and, for the first time since his father’s death, he begins to cry uncontrollably. He stuffs a few bills into the attendant’s hand and shifts into drive.

“Hang on,” the attendant calls after him. “Your change…”

By the time Ashif pulls the car over to the side of the highway, his legs are shaking. His face is wet with tears. His neck, too. He steps out onto the embankment. Below him there is a valley wrapped by snow-peaked mountains. An emerald-green lake at the bottom. He falls to his knees in anguish. He stays like this for a while, kneeling at the valley like an altar. When he finally stands up, his knees are patches of wet snow.

Ashif scurried alongside his father, trying to keep up. He was barely five. Both of them on their knees, as they rolled the massive ball of snow. Round and round, down a field in the park. Like a boulder. They only stopped when it was big enough for the base of the snowman’s body. Their first one. They rolled a smaller one for his middle, then another for his head. His father also brought along a paper bag with a carrot for the nose, bottle caps for the eyes and mouth.

“He’s so handsome,” a woman said when they were done. She and her daughter were building their own snowman a few feet away.

“He’s our first snowman!” Ashif declared.

“That’s special,” she said then turned to her daughter. “Isn’t that special, honey?”

“Uh-huh,” the girl said.

“Why don’t I take a picture?” the woman asked, pulling out a Polaroid camera from her knapsack.

“Sure!” Ashif said.

“That’s very nice of you,” Mansoor added.

The woman was about to snap the picture when Mansoor stopped her. “One second.” He pulled out a small flag from a paper bag. “Come, son. You do it,” he said.

“Smile!” the woman said.

Moments later, the camera spit out the picture. She waved it dry then handed it to Ashif. Like magic, an image of him and his father surfaced inside the frame. Ashif in his father’s arms, the two of them gazing at each other and laughing. Both of them in snowsuits and mukluks, like spacesuits. Their arms up in victory. A Canadian flag planted in the snowman’s head as big as the moon.

He dusts the snow from his pants and gazes one last time at the mountains, the valley, the lake below. “Please take care of my father,” he tells the mountains. He instinctively touches the tip of his index finger to his nose then his chin, a gesture made at the end of a prayer.