The first time Arthur asked for a photograph of my face without makeup, I thought it was romantic.
By the fourth time, I’d started to wonder.
“Another picture?” I teased him over the phone. I was sitting in my kitchen with a cup of tea going cold beside me and my reading glasses pushed up on my head. “Arthur, you’ve already seen me three times this week.”
“Please, Holly,” he said. His voice was warm and a little rough, the voice of a man who’d smoked a pipe once and quit a long time ago. “I love seeing you as you are.”
I laughed.
“You’ve seen me as I am at our coffee date. And at the botanical garden. And in that awful photo by the rosebush where I’m squinting.”
“Not nearly enough,” he said.
I should have asked him why right then.
I didn’t. I was seventy-eight years old, and a man was telling me he wanted to see my face. I didn’t want to ask questions. I wanted to believe him.
I should explain about my face.
When I was a girl, I had a soft, thin little shadow on my upper lip, the kind lots of girls have. Nobody noticed. Then, somewhere in my late teens, it started to darken. By the time I was twenty-two, it was a mustache.
Not a faint one. A real one. Dark and noticeable, the kind people saw from across a room.
Doctors told me it was hormones. They gave me long words and pamphlets and pills that made me sick to my stomach. None of them made it go away.
I spent more than fifty years learning ways to hide it.
I bleached it. I waxed it until the skin bled. I tried electrolysis three times, and each time it hurt so badly I cried in the parking lot. I shaved it every morning in the bathroom with the door locked, even after I was married, because I couldn’t stand for anyone to see me do it. I wore heavy powder. I learned to tilt my head down a little when I smiled. I learned to hold a coffee cup or a napkin near my mouth when I laughed.
Strangers stared. Some of them remembered their manners and looked away. Some of them didn’t. Once, in a grocery store, a little boy pointed at me and said loudly, “Mommy, why does that lady have a mustache like Grandpa?”
His mother pulled him away by the arm. She didn’t apologize. She just looked at me with this mix of pity and embarrassment, which was worse than if she’d laughed.
What hurt most, all those years, wasn’t the staring.
It was knowing that people noticed my mustache before they noticed me.
My husband, Walter, never once complained.
We met at a church picnic when I was twenty-six. He was a quiet, gangly man with big ears and a terrible singing voice. He worked as a pharmacist. He sat down next to me at the potato salad table and asked whether I thought the deviled eggs were safe to eat in that heat.
“I wouldn’t risk it,” I said. I had a napkin pressed against my mouth.
“Then I won’t,” he said. He looked at me. “You can put that down, you know. The napkin. I don’t mind.”
I’d been holding that napkin for two hours.
I put it down.
Walter kissed me good morning every single day for forty-three years. Whether I’d shaved or not. Whether I’d put on powder or not. He’d come into the kitchen in his bathrobe and kiss me right on the mouth, mustache and all, and say, “Good morning, Holly Jean.”
Once, years into our marriage, my cousin invited us to her daughter’s wedding. That morning, my upper lip looked particularly dark. I’d shaved it twice and it still showed through the powder. I sat on the edge of the bed in my good blue dress and told Walter I wasn’t going.
He didn’t argue.
He just went to the closet, got my coat, and held it out to me.
“Holly,” he said, “the bride invited you because she loves you. Nobody’s hiring you to model lipstick.”
I laughed in spite of myself.
I went to the wedding. I still checked my face in my compact six times during the ceremony. But I went.
Walter died nine years ago. A stroke, in his garden, among his tomato plants.
Afterward, I stopped thinking about romance completely. I was sixty-nine. I had my house, my roses, my church friends, and my granddaughter, Maddie, who came every Sunday. That was enough.
I could manage loneliness. I’d learned how.
What I couldn’t stand was the thought of another man studying my face and deciding whether I was acceptable.
I’d already had one man who didn’t care. I didn’t think I’d ever be lucky enough to find a second one.
Then my granddaughter signed me up for a dating app.
Maddie is twenty-eight. She’s a nurse, like her mother, and she has Walter’s ears and Walter’s stubbornness. She came over for Sunday dinner in March, sat down at my kitchen table, and held out her hand.
“Give me your phone, Grandma.”
“What for?”
“Just give it to me.”
I gave it to her. She tapped at it for ten minutes with her tongue sticking out of the corner of her mouth.
“There,” she said. She turned the screen around. “You’re on SilverHearts. It’s for people over sixty-five.”
“Madeline Rose,” I said. “Take that off right now.”
“No.”
“I’m seventy-eight years old!”
“So?” Maddie said. “Grandpa’s been gone nine years. You deserve company. You deserve somebody to go to the movies with. You deserve somebody to argue with about crossword puzzles.”
“I don’t want a man looking at my face and…”
I stopped.
Maddie looked at me for a long moment. She knew. She’d always known. When she was six, she’d asked me why I shaved like Daddy, and I’d been so embarrassed I’d changed the subject.
“Grandma,” she said gently, “anybody who doesn’t like your face isn’t worth your time. Okay?”
She uploaded a photograph of me she’d taken at Easter. I was laughing at something her husband had said. No napkin. No hand over my mouth. My mustache was right there, plain as anything.
“Not that one,” I said. “Maddie, please. Not that one.”
“That one,” she said. She pressed the button.
Three days later, Arthur appeared.
He was eighty, a widower, a retired commercial photographer. His profile picture showed a tall, thin man with white hair, a neatly trimmed white beard, and kind gray eyes behind wire glasses. He was standing on a dock somewhere, squinting into the sun, holding a fishing rod.
His first message asked whether I preferred doing crossword puzzles in pen or pencil.
I stared at it for a long time. It wasn’t hello, beautiful. It wasn’t I like your smile. It wasn’t about my face at all.
I typed back: Pen. I’m old enough to live dangerously.
His reply came in four minutes.
Then we’d get along.
We messaged every evening after that.
At first just a few lines. Then whole paragraphs. He told me about his late wife, Margaret, who’d died two years earlier after a long illness. He told me about his garden, which he admitted was mostly weeds. He told me he’d worked as a photographer for fifty years, mostly catalogs and advertisements, “nothing anyone would hang on a wall.”
He remembered everything I told him. He remembered that I grew roses, and he asked about them by name. My Peace roses, my Mister Lincolns, the climbing Eden on the trellis by the back door. He remembered that Maddie had just started a new job in the cardiac unit at St. Luke’s, and he asked how her first week went.
Walter used to remember things like that.
After two weeks, I decided to tell him.
I sat at my kitchen table one evening with my phone in my hand for almost an hour. I typed it out and deleted it four times.
Finally, I just wrote it plainly.
Arthur, I should tell you something before this goes any further. I have facial hair. A mustache. I’ve had it since I was young. You may have noticed in my photograph. If that bothers you, I understand completely, and I won’t be hurt.
That last part was a lie. I’d be very hurt.
I pressed send. I put the phone face-down on the table. I made a cup of tea I didn’t drink. I held my breath.
Twenty minutes later, the phone buzzed.
Please don’t ever shave it, Arthur wrote. I think you’re beautiful exactly as you are.
I read those words three times.
Then I cried. Right there at my kitchen table, at seventy-eight years old.
Not because Walter had failed to love me. He never failed. Not once in forty-three years.
I cried because I’d spent all those years refusing to believe him.
Our first date was at a little coffee shop downtown called The Daily Grind.
I almost didn’t go. I stood in front of my bathroom mirror for forty-five minutes. I shaved. Then I wished I hadn’t. Then I put on powder. Then I wiped it off. Then I put it back on again.
In the end, I wore a light layer of powder and my good lavender cardigan, and I went.
Arthur was already there when I walked in, sitting at a corner table by the window. He stood up when he saw me. He was even taller than I’d expected. He had a small white bakery box on the table in front of him.
“Holly,” he said. He held out his hand. “I hope you don’t mind. I brought lemon cookies.”
I stared at the box.
“How did you know I like lemon cookies?”
“You told me,” he said. “Last Tuesday. You said the lemon cookies at Hoffman’s Bakery were the only reason you ever went downtown.”
I had said that. I’d forgotten.
He’d remembered.
We talked for almost three hours.
At some point, I realized he was looking at my face. Really looking. Studying it. My hand went up automatically and covered my upper lip. Fifty years of habit.
Arthur noticed.
“You don’t have to do that around me, Holly,” he said gently. “Darling.”
I lowered my hand slowly.
I left it in my lap for the rest of the afternoon.
On our second date, we went to the botanical garden.
It was April. The tulips were out, thousands of them, red and yellow and pink. We walked slowly along the paths, because Arthur’s knee was bad and mine wasn’t much better.
In the rose garden, which wasn’t blooming yet, just green leaves and thorns, he stopped.
“Stand there,” he said. “By that bush.”
“Arthur, it doesn’t even have flowers.”
“I don’t need the flowers,” he said. He took out his phone. “Just you.”
I stood there by a rosebush with no roses on it, squinting into the sun. He took four pictures.
That evening, he sent me a message.
Would you send me another picture? Without makeup? I’d love to see your face the way it really is.
I thought about it for a long time.
Then I went into the bathroom, washed off my powder, stood by the window where the light was good, and took a picture of myself with my phone.
It took me eleven tries. My hands were shaking.
I sent it.
On our third date, we had lunch at a little Italian place.
Arthur asked a lot of questions that day. About my life. Where I’d grown up. What my parents had been like.
“Have you always lived here?” he asked.
“Not always,” I said. “My family moved around when I was young. My father sold farm equipment. We lived in four states before I was eighteen.”
He seemed very interested in that.
Maybe a little too interested.
“Which states?” he asked.
“Oh, all over,” I said. “Iowa. Ohio. Illinois for a few years. Then here.”
He nodded slowly. He didn’t ask anything else about it. But I noticed him write something down on a napkin when he thought I wasn’t looking, and fold it into his shirt pocket.
A few days later, Arthur invited me to dinner at his house.
“Helen will cook,” he said on the phone. “My housekeeper. She makes the best roast chicken in the state. Saturday at six?”
“I’d love that.”
“Wonderful.” He paused. “And Holly? Would you send me one more picture before then?”
I laughed.
“Arthur, at this rate you’ll have enough photographs to open a museum!”
“Just your face, darling. No makeup.”
I didn’t laugh this time.
“Why are you so interested?” I said. “Truly?”
There was a short pause on the line.
“Because I love your natural beauty,” he said.
I wanted that answer to be enough.
So I sent the picture.
But that night, lying in bed, I noticed something odd.
