Some Kind of Miracle by Iris R. Dart

singing it in a mock-nightclub-singer voice, enjoying his own performance, remembering every word of the song the girls had written morethan twenty-five years ago. Dahlia was queasy. It was a damned good thing she hadn’t tried to promote the idea that she’d written the song alone, because if she had and Louie saw the movie, there was no doubt he would come after her.
    “My mother actually got that piano for me , you know,” he said. “Not Sunny. But I thought only sissies played the piano. I mean, you probably don’t remember Liberace, but my mother loved him and wished I could be just like him.” Dahlia was trying not to show her surprise at Louie’s picking that song and then belting out every word and getting it right.
    A fat couple was coming in the door of the store, and Dahlia knew she was about to lose Louie to them, so she forged ahead. “So sad they’re all gone and nobody’s left but you and me and Sunny,” she tried, hoping she sounded appropriately sentimental. The couple was wandering over to look at garden tools, and Dahlia watched Louie watching them. “Maybe that’s why I thought I ought to go see her to find out if I could help her.”
    “Yeah,” Louie said, sighing absently.
    Gimme the address, gimme the address, she thought. That goddamned address could change my life.
    “Just a sec,” Louie said. “I’ll go get the address. But, Dahl, I gotta warn you—she’s pretty bad.”
    She smiled what she hoped looked like a gentle smile of understanding, and Louie went into the back room while a clerk walked over to help the shoppers. In her head she could hear her song being sung by Jennifer Lopez. “Stay by my side forever….” Dahliawould be watching from the audience at the Oscars in a long sequined dress, looking hot as hell. The camera would find her and linger on her because she was the songwriter and she looked so great. Maybe she’d even tell the story on the stage of the Oscars, about the way she and her cousin were so close that they wrote this song as a paean to their friendship. The audience would eat that up.
    “Here you go,” Louie said. “No point in calling ahead. They never answer the phone.”
    “Why not?” Dahlia asked.
    “Why not?” Louie laughed. “Because they’re all in a mini–funny farm, zonked out on drugs. They all think they’re Napoleon. You expect them to take a message? They can’t even string two thoughts together. Believe me, if I thought my sister could have even one human interaction, I’d bring her back here and give her a job in the store.”
    Louie waved the piece of paper bearing Sunny’s address in the air as he spoke. Dahlia nodded in agreement until she had the address in her hand. “Louie,” she said the minute she did, “I can’t tell you how much it means to me to see you again.” And she breezed out the door.
    In the silence of her van, she took a deep breath and, still parked in the small Gordon Hardware parking lot, looked at the address and wanted to kiss the scrap of paper. The name of the halfway house was the Sea View. It was in San Diego. Not too bad. For a while, she remembered, Sunny had been in some place up near Oakland. Oakland was far. San Diego was a couple of hours’ drive from L.A. No big deal.
    She’d pack a few things and head down there tomorrow with Seth. They’d stay overnight somewhere. Make it a romantic outing. She’d enjoy spending some of the money she’d have by next week. Just the beginning, she thought. She was back in show business. Marty Melman would never dream of dropping his pants to pee in front of a songwriter.
     
     
     
    Seth watched her pile her clothes into an old suitcase that smelled musty because she’d just dug it out of the same storage area where she’d found the tape recorder and the tape.
    “Think they’ll let me into the hotel with this shabby suitcase?” she asked.
    “As long as you pay the bill, they don’t care about the suitcase,” he said.
    Dahlia held up a