Amy set the tube of Ruby Woo in front of me, turned to her father, and said, And Daddy, there is something else I have been carrying. For six years.
The whole steakhouse was quiet. Gary told her again to sit down. She did not.
Six years ago, Amy said, she overheard her father on the phone in the garage, telling someone that he had stayed in the marriage for comfort, not for me, that I had gotten old and he was just waiting it out. She was twenty-six then, and she could not bear to break her mothers heart, so she carried it, and she watched him shrink me a little more every year, until a red lipstick on my sixtieth birthday was more than he could allow me to have.
She said she was done watching me make myself smaller to keep a man who had already left in every way but the one that counts.
He told me I looked like a clown. My daughter told a room full of our family that the only foolish thing at that table was a man who could not stand to see his wife feel beautiful.
Then Amy picked up the lipstick, and in front of everyone, she put it on me herself, the way my mother used to do before church. Ruby Woo. The color I had practiced in the mirror like a teenager.
And one by one, the women at that table, my daughters, my daughter-in-law, my own sister, took out lipsticks of their own and put them on. Not all red. Whatever they had. A table full of women refusing to apologize for their own faces.
Gary did not finish his steak. He left early. I let him. I stayed for my cake, and I blew out the candles in my mothers red lipstick, sixty years old and finally, finally not ashamed of my own mouth.
I filed in the spring. A woman who waits out her wife does not get to be surprised when she stops waiting too. I wear red lipstick every single day now. I look like my mother. I look like myself. I have never once looked like a clown.