Part 1: The Fourth Photograph
“Another picture?” I held the phone away from my ear and laughed. “Arthur, you already have three of my face.”
“Not nearly enough, Holly. Good light, no makeup, just you.”
It was a quarter past seven on a Thursday in October, and I stood at my kitchen window in Dayton, Ohio, with a dish towel over my shoulder and a pot of split-pea soup cooling on the stove.
At seventy-eight, I was not used to men requesting portraits of my upper lip.
The hair there had darkened when I was twenty-two. By thirty it was a mustache that no razor, wax, or bleaching cream could argue with for long.
I had spent more than fifty years in a quiet war with it. Tweezers in my purse. Powder in my glove box. A mirror check at every red light.
My late husband, Walter, never joined that war. He kissed me good morning whether I’d shaved or not.
Once I tried to skip his cousin’s wedding because I’d lost my nerve at the bathroom mirror. He stood in the hallway holding my coat open like a doorman.
“Holly, the bride invited you because she loves you,” he said. “Nobody’s hiring you to sell lipstick.”
Walter died nine years ago, and I put romance in the cedar chest with his neckties. Loneliness I could manage. What I couldn’t bear was the thought of a new man studying my face and deciding whether it passed.
Then my granddaughter, Maya, arrived one Sunday with a laptop and a determined expression.
“Grandma, you deserve someone to eat dinner with. Someone besides the cat.”
“I have a perfectly good cat.”
“He doesn’t do crosswords.” She was already uploading a photograph of me beside my roses. I didn’t even have time to stop her.
Three days later, a man named Arthur Whitlock sent a first message that asked whether I solved crosswords in pen or pencil.
“Pen,” I wrote back. “I’m old enough to live dangerously.”
“Then we’ll get along,” he replied.
He was eighty, a widower, a retired man who still ironed his own shirts. We wrote every evening. He remembered that I grew roses, that Maya had just started a job at a hospital billing office, that I hated cilantro.
One night I finally typed the thing I’d been circling. I told him about the mustache and held my breath after I hit send.
His answer took four minutes. I know because I watched the clock on the stove.
“Please don’t ever shave it. I think you’re beautiful exactly as you are.”
I read it three times. Then I cried at my kitchen table, and not because Walter had failed to say the same. He had said it for forty-six years. I had simply never believed him.
Arthur brought lemon cookies to our first date at a little café on Brown Street. When I caught him looking at my face, my fingers flew to my lip out of old habit.
“You don’t have to do that around me, Holly,” he said gently. I lowered my hand.
On our second date, he took my picture beside a rosebush in the park. That night he asked for another one, bare-faced, by text. I sent it, feeling bold and a little giddy.
On the third date, he asked whether I’d always lived in Ohio.
“Not always,” I said. “My family moved around when I was young.”
He leaned forward, a little too interested. I noticed, and then talked myself out of noticing.
