Tuesday Writing Prompt: "Dear Diary"

“Dear Diary?” he asked. “What? As a title?”

She fumbled with the chromed ashtray lid on her armrest. The Packard was older but well kept – the ashtray lid evidently an exception.

“Chester, I asked you to loosen this lid. Use oil or something on the hinge of it. Today.”

Chester raised a finger to his hat – and nodded slightly.

Unable to budge it, she rolled down the window to the sound of engines humming at the intersection of 49th and 5th outside Rockefeller Center. The rain shot down onto the windows in firm, window-rattling missiles. Her long, ruby fingernails tapped the cigarette holder into the dreary twilight.

“Yes. Dear Diary. I’ve quite made up my mind.”

“But, Darling, last week . . . surely you . . .”

“I won’t have it any other way,” she said, looking down at her skirt for ash and smoothing the green silk. “Chester, cut over on 44th, please. Lunch at the Algonquin today. I wish to sit by the hearth with the firelight behind me. I feel like a wretched, wrinkled, rumpled, dampened mess.”

Chester lifted his right forefinger off the wheel in deferent recognition.

She turned to Robert and lifted her eyebrows. “Need I remind you, dear husband, that you are addressing a Pulitzer Prize–winning, Tony Award–winning author of 17 plays, 8 of which have gone to broadway, 3 of which have become hits, and one of which has been made into a movie for which I also received an Oscar. A shared Oscar, albeit, but I hardly think that . . .”

“Dear Diary it is, then.” He said, slumping down into the seat and watching the rain run down his window in small diverting creeks, the tightness growing in his stomach. Her original title, My Dearest Love Robert, had touched him in a way he hadn’t felt for years – since before the awards and glamour. Since before the limousines and the park-side move.

Somehow he knew it wouldn’t last.