We Fell Hard

I Think It's Time to Take These Masks Off Now

When I came through the automatic doors of the Home Depot, I wasn’t exactly sure where the Garden section was—and Lee Ray’s text had said to meet him there. But as I stood in my mask looking around at everyone else in their masks on a Thursday afternoon—it was the first summer of Covid, 2020—he appeared in front of me. A masked man with the bluest and most friendly eyes that crinkled at the corners so that I knew that he was smiling behind the mask.

“If it makes you feel safer, I can pretend to be shopping nearby when you meet him,” a friend of mine had said a few days before. “But it’s Home Depot. You’ll be fine. Have a great time and call me after your date!”

“Why aren’t you worried about this?” I asked her. She was responsible and respected—and even in some city council meetings, feared. As the director of our town’s non-profit that assisted homeless families, she was a skilled fundraiser as well as someone who spent days and nights making sure people were sheltered. She took the city to task for not funding any programs or inititatives that would provide much-needed resources.

This is all to say that I expected her to worry, or to judge me for meeting someone online during Covid. But she was happy for me, thrilled even. Maybe it’s because she had found love recently, in her early sixties, and wanted it for me, too.

Another friend had met someone online in her city and was also part of my cheering section. She had given me the idea to meet up in Home Depot—where she was sure “cowboys hang out”—and had been the one to encourage me to take our texts, Facebook Messengers, phone calls, and FaceTimes, into the real world.

“You want to meet him sooner rather than later,” she said, more of a veteran of online dating than me. “Make it real so you know if you have chemistry with him or not. Whether he’s really hot or not-ha!”

“LOL,” I texted back. “It’s about a hundred degrees here, so I’m not sure what we’ll do or where we’ll go once we meet. I bought some snack-type stuff and some beer, but I’m not sure I should invite him back to my house.”

“Go have fun,” she said. “Just see how it goes. He looks so handsome and friendly in his pic. I can’t imagine he’s an axe murderer from what you’ve said. But you’ll know what to do.”

I had texted her the picture that he’d sent me earlier in the day. I had said that it would make me more comfortable if we wore masks when we met, even if a lot of people in my town didn’t. I knew that he didn’t wear one on the ranch. Back then, early in the pandemic, I had seized on masks as the only way to avoid Covid.

Of course, three years later, I’ve had two bad cases with all the shots and boosters. Lee Ray has had three.

But back then, all he’d said when I asked was this: “I just want you to feel comfortable. Here you go.”

That day in the Home Depot, he was wearing a straw cowboy hat, a pink-striped shirt that he later told me he’d rodeo-d in in his twenties and kept for special occasions, and the biggest belt buckle I’d ever seen, also a rodeo prize from bronc riding. His whole outfit was as if he’d stepped off the set of a Western. He was through the looking glass into another world.

Though you can drive fifteen minutes in any direction and hit cattle ranches, Pueblo is a small industrial city, known for the still-standing steel mill, often called the Pittsburgh of the west. Though it’s ringed by mountains and is much more beautiful than the butt of Colorado jokes it receives—running on the high plains desert trails have brought me so much joy and comfort—it’s not a place where I’ve seen many cowboys hanging out. Not that they would be hanging in the Target or at the library or the gym, and I do see ranching families shopping in the Pueblo Mall, but I work from home. In many ways, when Covid came, Zoom was already my neighborhood.

I had worn all white: Levi cutoffs, white tank, platform heels, a tan from running. I was 54 and had been on a “hormone journey,” as my doctor says, that had been rocky until we figured out what hormones I needed to replace the ones I didn’t have. He had been my doctor through some bad trail falls and the aftermaths of some tough marathons. But menopause at 51 had broken my stride. It’s no joke. But I had finally started feeling like myself.

So there we were: the born and bred Colorado cowboy and the East Coast transplant who would always have some city in me despite the decades of living far from that coast.

“It’s so good to see you in person,” he said. “Can I pick you up?”

“What? I asked, looking around nervously. “You mean lift me off the ground? “You don’t really know me.”

We laugh about it now, how nervous I was and how I kept telling him not to hold my hand, “because we don’t know each other.”

I don’t remember much of that time in Home Depot. We walked the aisles—and I finally let him hold my hand and he winked at me above his mask. It felt so natural, there on a Thursday afternoon. I had done my time in Home Depots with other boyfriends, though they would drop me off at Target or TJMaxx while they got whatever they needed. But he made me feel safe. I didn’t know him, true. I was still suspicious—cue the New Yorker in me—but I also smiled a lot behind my mask.

Then we were outside at his truck. We knew we didn’t want our first meeting—what felt like a first date—to end.

“You want to follow me over to the Sportsman’s Warehouse?” he asked me. “I want to see if they have some ammunition I’m looking for.”

“Ammunition?” It might as well have been a different language.

“Yeah, for my guns,” he said. “We guide hunters and I carry a gun in my truck all the time,” he said. “We protect the cattle from mountain lions and coyotes,” he said.

I had lived in Pueblo for a long time, but had never heard of the Sportsman’s Warehouse. It turns out that I had driven by it countless times on my way to some of my favorite trails.

Men—the ones I’d dated—and guns: they have all grown up hunting. Some had even been in the NRA back “before they turned into a bunch of lunatics,” is how my ex, Austin, put it. They believe in gun control. They carry guns in their vehicles and keep them at home. So I wasn’t surprised. I just didn’t think we’d be shopping for ammunition.

I got in my car and took the shortcut over to Sportsman’s Warehouse once I realized where it was. But Lee Ray wasn’t there.

“Are you kidding me?” I thought. Am I actually being stood up right now? I had thought we were having a sort of magical time.

I thought of calling him, but wasn’t sure what I’d say. I felt hurt.

Just when I was about to call, I saw his truck pull in next to mine.

“I thought you had ghosted me,” he said. “You were behind me and then I saw your car take a different turn. “I was bummed. I was hoping you might still show up.”

“I just took the shortcut,” I said. “I thought you ghosted me.”

“Now why would I do that to such a beautiful lady?” he said.

“OK, Mr. Romancer,” I said, taking his outstretched hand. I wasn’t suspicious anymore.

After a half hour of looking at everything possible camo—and saying that sure, I liked it—so much so that the following week, a camisole tank dress arrived from Amazon—I decided to invite him back to my house.

“Only if you feel comfortable,” he said. “I can head back home, but I’d sure like to spend more time getting to know you.”

I live in a close-knit block in an area of Pueblo called “the Blocks” above the beautifully refurbished train station. Many of us work from home and everyone looks out for each other. I have neighbors who have lived on this block for fifty years. I feel very safe that my neighbors know when I’m home and what I’m up to.

“Sure,” I said. “I feel OK about it.

So we sat on the deck as it cooled down and talked for hours—about our most recent relationships, our families, his life on the ranch, which felt so glamorous and cinematic. And about my adventures on the page with writers and Pikes Peak, which we could see forty miles in the distance.

Then we went inside—and because I’m me, our masks went back on. We’d had them on in Home Depot and the Sportsman’s Warehouse, with a break on the deck, telling each other how nice it was to see all of each other without masks.

An hour later, we were still on opposite ends of the couch, talking through masks. I wasn’t sure then if we had chemistry—I think we did. But he was so polite, not even holding my hand or asking to. He later told me that he knew that it was a lot—that he was there—and he wanted me to be comfortable. We had just met.

“Do you want to see the rest of the house?” I asked. The tour would be short—it’s a small place that I love, with old brick and high ceilings.

“Sure,” he said.

But after we took a few steps, we both stopped. I was in front of him. His blue eyes bright above the mask. I could smell his cologne and the heat off his body.

“I think I’m ready to take my mask off now,” I said, surprising myself. I took it off and tried to fling it away.

“Oh, yeah?” he said. “Well, it’s about time.”

Then he kissed me.