Cruel Summer

When my boyfriend told me not to follow him to another continent, ending the first relationship I’d cared about in years, I was so bereft I couldn’t eat. At nearly thirty, I suddenly wanted to be in my childhood home, so I flew from New York to Edmonton only to find myself unable to discuss the breakup once I arrived. My parents responded by falling back on an unwritten script. They took me to Jasper.

A four-hour drive away, Jasper was hardly around the corner, but the mountain town was our habitual source of grandeur, a place where the air smells like pine and the prairie horizon ruptures into jagged peaks of shale. We took its superiority to Banff as an article of faith, insisting that Jasper is less commercial and less contaminated by proximity to Calgary, the arch‑nemesis of any self-respecting Edmontonian. I’d shown up with the frost in late September — shoulder season — so my father booked us a last-minute cabin, and we set out in search of redemption by...