"You did," Ray answered. "The mountain gave it back. I'm just the messenger. Messengers get coffee, if the message is welcome."
"The message is welcome," Ellen said, and then he kissed her properly, in the mild March air, soft bronze liner and glossy nude lips and the brass compass warming slowly in her pocket between them.
They married in September of 1982, on a clear day above timberline where the wind had opinions but agreed, for an hour, to lower its voice. A justice of the peace arrived by jeep with a book and a pen that kept drying out in the thin air. Six friends came who did not mind the wind or the lack of a caterer—patrol partners, the bookstore owner, Ellen's sister from Ohio with a shawl she had knitted on the train. Ellen wore a cream dress that was not a turtleneck and a fair isle pattern knitted into the trim of the shawl, honey-brown feathered hair loose under a simple comb that flashed when she turned. Soft bronze liner, glossy nude lips. She looked like herself, which was the point. Ray wore a grey suit that looked slightly surprised to be on a ski patrolman, and polished shoes that would never forgive the scree, and no one mentioned the white cross, though everyone there knew what it meant and what it had cost. They did not compare the day to anything else in magazines or movies. It was only itself—vows spoken into thin air that carried them farther than expected, a brass compass wrapped into Ellen's small bouquet with ribbon so it would not fall among the rocks, and afterward a dinner in Silverton at a long table where the pie was pecan again and the lights along the street blinked as if they remembered the Christmas when two people had walked beneath them testing ice.