Chapter 9
Summer, 2000
Frannie smiled as she examined the wedding invitation. Penny had helped her with the dancing and her husband was producing this show. He was the one who managed to premiere it on Pay-Per-View. But this was a show about her parent’s and their life, plus the story of how they met. It wasn’t all a happy story and Frannie knew it, as well as Philip. It was a story told so many times over and over again that she almost didn’t want to do it.
But in the end, her parents had come first. This was their story, their anniversary. And suddenly, she didn’t mind sharing it with the rest of the world. She knew that they wanted to share it with her.
Frannie put the invitation back into its proper place and closed the diary, this time, she thought, for good. There were only two more of her mother’s happy entries left. After that, things slid downhill.
Baby’s next two entries concerned themselves with the end of summer, of Johnny promising to wait for her to finish Mount Holyoke and marry next year during the summer of 1967, all with her parents’ permission.
“Life is too wonderful,� she wrote, “something is bound to happen.�
And it did.
In October of 1966, Baby received a letter from Johnny that left her in tears. He had broken the pact that they had made and ran off to Las Vegas to marry Camille. At first, Baby didn’t believe it, this wasn’t like Johnny, she thought. She called New York City and found that Camille had indeed gotten married and that Johnny wasn’t there.
She had never let the person on the other end finish and had hung up on them. There was no need to explain to him then, that she was moving out of the dorm with Rochelle into an apartment to make room for other girls arriving for the new semester. Before she left, she gave her parents all the information in case someone should want it.
She had never left it with the school.
Then she called Paul. She told him what he had wanted to hear, that she would marry him. And so she did, right after school ended in December.
They married and had come back to New York to look for an apartment. They had finally found one and made arrangements to move in. That’s when Baby found herself pregnant. She was six months along in June when the accident happened. They were coming back from visiting her parents when the drunk driver hit them killing Paul instantly and putting Baby into a coma.
Frannie sighed and found the envelope. She didn’t want to open it, but she did. Paid up hospital bills, discharge papers and her original birth certificate.
She opened it up to the second half of the diary, except this time it wasn’t her mother doing the writing, now it was her stepfather.