The Grain Elevator Lover

My divorce went through in March, two years ago now. I was thirty-two and married to a man who played golf the way people fill out taxes, carefully and without joy. We lasted two years of marriage. The funny part is we never fought. We just ran out of things to say to each other, and one day I looked across the kitchen table and realized I felt nothing at all, not even anger. So we filed the papers and split the clubs evenly and that ended it.

I teach golf at a public course outside Prairie Junction. I'm the head pro, thirty-four years old, and I spend my days watching retired men slice drives into the pond and telling them it's their grip. It's fine work. It pays the mortgage. But after the divorce my evenings got very quiet, and I got tired of quiet, and that's how I ended up on a dating app at one in the morning with a glass of wine and a phone I should have put down hours earlier.

That's where I found Murray Wiseman. He was thirty-six, wrote grant applications for an art gallery, and his profile picture showed him standing in front of a grain elevator like it was a national monument. His bio said he was looking for someone to have long conversations with, which I figured was code for something, but it turned out he really just meant it. We started chatting in October. It's now January and we have never once gone a day without talking.

He asks me questions nobody has asked me before. Not personal invasive questions, just real ones. He wanted to know if teaching golf ever felt like watching grass grow, and I told him sometimes it does, and he wrote back three paragraphs about the difference between patience and boredom. I read it twice. I don't think anyone had ever written me three paragraphs about anything.

My sister Lila says I have a crush on a man I've never seen in person. I told her that's ridiculous. Then I reorganized my whole week around the hours he's usually online, so maybe she had a point.

His gallery is in the old grain elevator on the edge of Prairie Junction. Some foundation bought it years ago and turned it into a gallery and community space. He works there half the week and lives in the city the other half, which means we were only forty miles apart this whole time, sitting on our phones like a couple of lovesick fools. I had seen the elevator my whole life. Everyone in town has. It's this huge pale tower with the town name painted down the side, and now it has a glass door and a little sign. I kept meaning to go in. I kept not going in, because I wanted to meet him properly and I was scared to.

Then came last Friday. The storm had been building all week and on Friday afternoon it arrived, the biggest blizzard this county has seen since the seventies, the kind that closes the interstate and makes the news. The airport shut down by noon. Roads went white. And my phone rang with Murray's name on it, which never happens, because we type, we don't call.

I answered and he was already talking. "They canceled everything, Lorrie. Everything. The flight, the rebooking, all of it, and I'm stuck at the gallery because I went back for my coat and then the plows stopped running and..."

"Murray. Breathe."

"I'm stuck here. Marguerite went home before the worst of it and I have a cot in the back office and a vending machine and apparently the whole weekend to think about what an idiot I am for booking a January flight."

"So you'll be there all weekend," I said. "Alone. In a grain elevator."

"In a grain elevator, yes, thank you, I'm aware of how it sounds."

I looked out my window. Snow was coming down sideways. My street was already disappearing. "I'm coming over," I said, and he went quiet, and then he said my name like a question, and I said it again. I'm coming over. He said the roads were terrible. I said I have four-wheel drive and new tires and I've driven in worse. He said he didn't want me to get hurt. I said I'd been driving these roads since before he had his grant writing job, and after a while he gave me the street address and told me to text him at every mile.

The thing about my drive over is this. It took an hour and ten minutes for a trip that usually takes fifty minutes, and half of it I couldn't see the road, and I should probably have turned around. I didn't turn around. I had the heater going and both hands on the wheel and this stupid grin on my face the entire time, because in about forty minutes I was going to stand in the same room as a man I'd typed good night to every night for three months, and I couldn't feel my face from the cold and I didn't care.

I texted him from the parking lot. He came out the glass door with a coat over his pajamas and a flashlight and stood there in the snow looking at me like he wasn't sure I was real.

We stood about six feet apart in a blizzard and just looked at each other. He's taller than his photos. Brown hair going gray at the temples, big hands, the kind of face that goes soft when it's not performing for anything. I could hear the wind off the elevator above us, this low roar in the steel.

"You drove an hour in that," he finally said, shouting a little over the wind.

"You booked a January flight," I shouted back. "We're both idiots. Let me in."

Inside, the gallery was warm and mostly dark, lit by a few emergency lights along the baseboards. He gave me slippers from a lost-and-found box and took my coat and then we stood in the middle of the lobby with nothing to do with our hands. Three months of talking and we'd both gone mute. I pointed at a painting on the far wall and said something dumb about the colors and he agreed and then we both laughed at how bad we were at this, and after that it got easier.

He found a bottle of wine in Marguerite's office fridge, the kind people bring to gallery openings and leave behind, and we drank it out of coffee mugs at the little reception desk, sitting on folding chairs, with a flashlight on the desk between us because the emergency lights made everything look like a hospital.

I told him about the divorce. I don't usually tell people about it this early, because it makes the room go heavy and they get that careful face. He didn't get the