He sat there for some time—five minutes? fifteen?—then bestirred himself, picked up his bag and walked on numb legs and nerveless feet into the waiting room. He shuffled to the clerk’s window and inquired after a message for Henry H. Lightcap.

The clerk looked. There was nothing.

Henry shuffled outside into the hearty sunlight. He saw dozens of happy people moving about, couples arm in arm, young lovers snuggled close on the front seat of automobiles. He raised his eyes to the dark conifers and pale green aspens crowding the mountainsides, to the gray scree of the peaks, to the snowfields and the first thick clouds forming out of nothing, ex nihilo, on the skyline. Stunned, he waited another hour, then drove slowly out of town.

He was ten miles west before he remembered to shift from second into third, twenty miles farther before he remembered the beer and the two bottles of wine, one red one white, wrapped in his bedroll.

Somewhere along the river road to Moab, under the beaked gods and visored goddesses of Fisher Towers, he turned aside up a rocky ravine, plowed firmly into the boughs of a juniper tree and stalled. Little blue-green berries rained down on cab and hood of truck. Henry kicked open the door to let his legs hang out, stretched lengthwise on the bench seat, pillowed his head on his forearm and subsided into the nirvana of unconsciousness.

ON THE AFTERNOON of the following day he checked in at Park Headquarters for mail. Among the letters, bills and junk in his box he found a memo.

Lightcap: Some female named Claire phoned long-distance yesterday to say she could not keep her date. Asked us to relay the message. We called you on the radio but you were already gone. Hope everything turned out all right.

—Gibbs

HE FOUND other diversions.

But the pain lingered for weeks, months, years. He did not write to her again until her letter came, a week after his happy journey to Glenwood Springs and back.

Dear Henry,

Sorry I couldn’t make it to the Springs last week. Had a fight with my mother that day—she still wants me to go to Smith, just because she went there. What kind of logic is that? Then I found out there was no return train on the same day. It seemed better to forget the whole thing. Maybe some other time. I trust that you received my phone message in time. Do write to me now and then, when you feel like it. I love your letters. You are the most desperately romantic man I have ever known, and if I believed half of what you write I’d be a little worried about your mental health. (Just kidding, Henry.) I appreciate your feelings about me but—you must try to remember that I don’t feel ready to enter into a serious relationship—let alone an “affair”—with any man as of yet. Maybe next year. But you are the funniest one I know and really I do like you a lot. Best regards from your friend,