Areliaa ad: What is that on your lips?

At 52, my husband said I looked "like a hospital patient." A month later he crashed my book club trip to Savannah. He's been sleeping in the guest room ever since. Twenty-seven years ago, I married Rick. We met at a friend's crawfish boil in Baton Rouge. I was twenty-five. He was twenty-nine and owned two trucks and a heating and cooling business with his name painted on the doors. We have two kids. Kayla teaches third grade in Austin. Ryan is in the Navy, stationed in Norfolk. For most of those years, we were a good team. He ran the business. I ran the books, the house, the kids, and every birthday party on our street. Then last spring Rick sold the company. Retired at fifty-six. Enough money that we'll be fine. That's when things shifted. He took up pickleball. Every morning at seven, the courts behind the rec center. Then breakfast with the same five men. Then pickleball again at four. Most of those men are on their second marriages. Gary's wife Brittany is thirty-nine. Wes married a yoga teacher from Lafayette. Kenny's girlfriend sells real estate and is on every billboard on Highway 61. Rick started coming home with reports. "Brittany always looks like she just got back from the beach." "Wes's wife has that healthy glow, you know? Even at the courts at dawn." "Kenny's girlfriend is always put together. Every single time." He never said it about me. He just kept saying it about them. Here's something you need to know about me. I gave up lipstick two years ago. Every tube I tried left my lips dry and flaky. The color seeped into every tiny crease at the edge of my mouth and made me look like I'd put it on at a red light. So I quit. Lip balm, that was it. I told myself nobody looks at a fifty-year-old woman's mouth anyway. I was wrong about that. At Easter, Rick's sister Paula met me in the driveway, hugged me, and held me at arm's length. Then she found Rick out by the grill and said something to him under her breath. That night he leaned on the bathroom counter while I took my earrings off. "Paula asked me if you've been sick," he said. "I told her no. You're just a little gray lately, Denise. Washed out. It's probably nothing." It's probably nothing. In June we went to dinner with Gary and Brittany. When the waiter offered to take a picture, Rick said, "Get the three of us. Denise hates pictures." I have never once said I hate pictures. At his retirement party in August, the photographer lined everybody up on the porch steps. Rick put me in the back row. Behind Kenny. "You'll be fine back there," he said. I'm five-foot-three. When the photos came out, I was a pale smudge behind a man's shoulder. Then one night in September he looked up from his phone while I was folding towels. "Hon, somebody has to tell you. Lately you look like a hospital patient. Maybe put some color on. Brittany could give you some tips." He smiled at me as if he had handed me a present. I folded the rest of the towels without a word. The next week my phone lit up with a group text from my book club. There are five of us. We've read a book a month together for eleven years. Through two divorces, one move to Florida and back, and every kid's graduation. "Savannah. Five days. October. Lorraine found a house on Jones Street. Who's coming?" I typed yes before I finished reading. I told Rick at supper. He set down his fork. "Savannah? For five days?" "Yes." "With the book club?" "Yes." He chewed for a while. "Those women post everything, Denise. Every meal, every outfit, all over Facebook. You want to be in all that?" "I want to go." "Okay. I'm only saying. You might want to fix yourself up a little before." I rinsed my plate and went out to the porch before I said something I'd have to take back. The next afternoon I drove over to see Gail. Gail lives two streets over. She's fifty-eight and has been a dental hygienist for twenty-six years. Half the town has had Gail's hands in their mouth, and she remembers every one of them. I laid it all out for her over coffee at her kitchen table. Paula in the driveway. The back row. The hospital. Gail didn't answer right away. She tipped my chin up to the window and studied my mouth the way she does when you're leaning back in her chair. Then she said, "Stay right there." She came back from her bathroom with a slim little tube you could see straight through. "Areliaa," she said. "I've had a second one in my drawer for a month. It's had your name on it the whole time." "My name?" "Denise. I look at mouths all day from six inches away. When the lips lose their color, the whole face goes with them. Yours has been fading across my kitchen table since spring. It wasn't my place to say it first. I figured you'd bring it up yourself, or somebody would get cruel enough to make me." I turned it over in my hand. "Every lipstick I've tried turns my lips to sandpaper." "That's why this one. It goes on clear, then your own lips bring up the color, so it's you, just awake. It's different on every woman. Jojoba oil, squalane and vitamin E. It keeps your lips soft, and it won't go wandering into those creases." She tapped the tube. "It has 4.8 out of 5 stars from over 4,300 reviews, and I believe every one. They do Buy 1, Get 1 Free, two for $19.97, and you have 90 days to ask for a refund if it's not for you. But you're taking this one home tonight." After supper I locked the bathroom door and tried it. Within a minute my mouth had color again. My own color, the one I hadn't seen in two years. The next day I kept drifting back to the mirror. I wasn't fixing anything. I was just standing there, looking at a woman who seemed about to go somewhere. I hadn't felt that way in a long time. Three days before the trip I was packing on the bed. Rick leaned in the bedroom door. "That's it? One carry-on?" "That's it." "You don't want to bring some makeup? Some options?" I showed him Gail's tube and tucked it in the side pocket. "I've got what I need." On the day I flew out, I took a cab to the airport. Rick was at the kitchen counter with his pickleball bag already zipped by the door. "Have fun," he said. "Don't get too much sun. You burn." I left. I got through security, sat over a coffee for an hour, and walked down to Gate B9. And there he was. Rick. Sitting by the window with a new rolling suitcase and his pickleball bag across his knees. He stood up when he saw me. "Don't be mad." "Rick. Why are you at my gate?" "I got worried. Five days, a strange city, you and four women. I booked a room at a hotel on the river. I won't get in your way. I'll play some pickleball. I just want to be close by." "You bought a ticket on my flight and didn't tell me." "I thought you'd like it." The gate agent pretended not to listen. His paddle bag wouldn't fit in the overhead, so they made him gate-check it, and then they made him gate-check the suitcase too, because his boarding group went last and the bins were full. He stood on the jet bridge arguing about it while I found my seat. I had a window. He was in row thirty-one, by the bathroom. The others had flown out that morning, and they met me at baggage claim in Savannah. I had nothing to pick up. Rick did. "Is that Rick?" "That's Rick." "Did you know he was coming?" "I found out at the gate." Lorraine put her arm through mine. "Well. He can find his own ride." The house on Jones Street had tall windows and a little iron balcony. I unpacked in four minutes, washed my face, and put Gail's tube to work. When I came down, Teresa was out on the front steps with her iced tea. She looked up at me and squinted. "Oh, you got your color back. When did that happen?" "Recently." "It suits you. What is it?" "Something Gail gave me." She kept looking at me. "Text me the name later. I mean it." That evening we walked to dinner through Chippewa Square under all that Spanish moss. Rick was waiting at the edge of the square with his hands in his pockets. He'd spent the afternoon walking the riverfront without a hat. His forehead and nose were burned. He still had on the golf shirt he'd flown in. "Found you," he said. "Thought I'd see where you girls were eating." The girls looked at me. "We have a reservation for five, Rick." He stood there. Then he said he'd grab a burger at the hotel. Day two he texted at nine. "Where are you all today?" I didn't answer. He found us anyway at the riverfront at noon. He'd bought a T-shirt from a shop on River Street with a cartoon alligator on it. His suitcase was still somewhere in Atlanta. We took the trolley tour that afternoon. He said he'd pass. Day three we had lunch on a rooftop with a view of the cathedral spires. Two tables over, a young woman, maybe thirty-five, kept glancing my way. Finally she got up and came and crouched by my chair. "I'm so sorry to interrupt. What is that on your lips?" "Oh. Just a lipstick a friend gave me." "It doesn't even look like lipstick. It's just your mouth, only happier, like you've just been laughing. My mom spends forty dollars a tube and says each one makes her look older." Then she covered her mouth. "Listen to me. I'm a lot." "It's called Areliaa." She spelled it back to me and ordered right there at the table. "Two. One for my mom." Then she was gone. Our table went quiet. Then Michelle said, "Denise. The trolley driver noticed yesterday too. I heard him." "He did?" "He told you that you had the nicest smile on the whole trolley. I almost poked you." And Rick, of course, was at a table by the railing. He'd followed us up. He'd heard every word. He looked down at his sweet tea and stayed that way. I sat there and let him look at his tea. And I remembered Paula in the driveway at Easter. Holding me at arm's length. Then going straight to Rick at the grill. She'd asked him. She hadn't asked me. For months, everybody had been talking about my face to everyone but me. On day four we took the riverboat, and that afternoon I put some pictures up. All of us crowded at the boat railing, hair everywhere. The whole book club laughing in a booth at a seafood place on Broughton Street. One from Chippewa Square the first night, all of us arm in arm, and Rick in the background at the edge of the square with his hands in his pockets. We were having iced coffee at a sidewalk table on Wright Square when my phone started buzzing. Kayla: "MOM. Who is this glamorous woman??" Paula: "You look wonderful, honey." Then Rick's phone started going off. He was sitting on a bench across the square, and I watched his face change as he scrolled. Gary: "Rick, Denise looks great. Is that you in the back?" Wes: "Man, your wife is glowing." Kenny: "Brother, why are you in the back row?" He crossed the square and stopped by our table, phone still in his hand. "I got it wrong," he said. "Got what wrong?" "All of it. Coming down here. The stuff I've been saying since spring." The girls were looking hard at their menus. "I'm going to fly home tomorrow," he said. "You should have your trip. I'm sorry, Denise." He left in the morning. His suitcase reached his hotel the same afternoon he checked out. We spent the last day exactly the way we'd planned. A long breakfast. Bookstores. Pralines on the sidewalk. Nobody hovering. Back home, Rick was on the living room couch waiting for me. "Can we talk?" "We can. Tomorrow. Tonight the guest room's made up for you." He nodded and went to get a pillow. The next evening, we sat down and talked for real. He told me his buddies' young wives had made him feel old. That every morning on those courts he felt like the oldest man there. That it was easier to look at my face and see age than to look in his own mirror. "When you walked out that door with one little bag," he said, "you looked like you were going somewhere I couldn't follow. And it scared me to death." "You followed me anyway." "I know. I'm sorry." He's still in the guest room. But last night he asked me how my day was, and he waited for the answer. Last week Gail called. "Well? How was Savannah?" I went through all of it. Gate B9. The alligator shirt. The woman on the rooftop. Rick in the guest room. She laughed so hard she had to put the phone down. Then she said, "Order the two-pack now, before that one runs out. Keep one, and give the second one away. Any woman you see standing in the back row." I ordered that night. I keep thinking about how many people noticed my face before I did. Paula. Gail. Rick and his reports from the pickleball courts. And I keep thinking about how a stranger on a rooftop in Savannah told me in thirty seconds what my own husband couldn't say kindly in six months. If somebody you love has started telling you that you look tired, gray, washed out, or sick. If you've quietly let them put you in the back row of every picture. If you gave up lipstick because every tube dried you out and ran into your lines. Maybe it isn't your age. Maybe your lips just need their color back. Areliaa Signature Lipstick. Rated 4.8 out of 5 from over 4,300 reviews. Buy 1, Get 1 Free, two for $19.97. Wear it for 90 days, and if you don't love it, they'll refund you. Get the two-pack. Keep one in your purse. The second is for the friend who's been hiding behind somebody's shoulder in every photo. And when somebody lines up a picture, take a spot up front.