Some Kind of Miracle (5 page)

Bad idea. There was no way she was going to go begging Louie. If she told him she had to get through
to Sunny, he’d laugh at her. He’d definitely want to take Sunny’s share of any money for himself. Somehow, just because he was Louie, he’d figure out a way to screw it up. Shit! Why had she written Sunny’s name on the CD? That was really stupid. Maybe she could just tell Marty that Sunny was a fictitious person she made up. Yeah, sure. He’d really believe that. Maybe she could get him to send the contract over and she could forge a signature. Sunny would never know about it. According to Louie, Sunny would never know about anything again.

“T
hank you for calling Bank of America’s twenty-four-hour banking service. For account balances or to stop payment on a check, please press one.”

Maybe it was the stock market’s being so iffy that made people cut back on their luxuries, or maybe it was just the fact that it was summer and people were traveling, but the massage business was going into the toilet. Dahlia still had her few regulars, but they weren’t enough to pay her bills. At least Seth split the mortgage payment with her, and that helped a lot, but her cash-flow situation was getting desperate. Tomorrow she’d deposit about two hundred and fifty dollars, but her balance had to be precariously low.

“Please enter your ten-digit account number.

“Please enter the last four digits of your Social Security number.

“Your current balance is seven dollars and twenty-three cents.”

After her mother died, her father had been in such bad shape that Dahlia had moved him into a convalescent home where they provided assisted living. He had no health insurance, so all the proceeds from the sale of her parents’ house had gone into keeping him in the tiny, shared room where Dahlia went to visit him nearly every day, though he barely knew she was there. Then, as if her father had been keeping daily track of what was in the bank, he died on the day the balance in his account was down to twenty-seven dollars.

The truth was that this little massage business of hers wasn’t going to keep her afloat. She had to do something about her life. She was too young to be a has-been and too good to be a one-trick pony with only one idea. She had lots of ideas. Unfortunately, nobody thought they were good but her. Today there were very few publishing deals like there used to be for songwriters. Once she thought her future was going to be turning out hit song after hit song and living a life of luxury. Tonight she put the heels of her hands against her eyes, trying to ward off the headache that was coming on. She had to do the math and figure out how long it was going to take her to come up with the cash for her half of the mortgage payment.

The familiar smell of Uncle Max’s hardware store engulfed her the instant she walked in the front door. She used to come here as a little girl and be fascinated with the seed packets and their flowery designs, and she used to love the colorful plastic kiddie pools that
Uncle Max always displayed outside every morning to attract the commuters who drove by on Moorpark Street. Louie still put the same racks of merchandise outside that she remembered from her childhood.

Maybe seeing her face would bring back some warm feelings and Louie would drop his usual hard-ass defensiveness that used to make everyone in the family refer to him behind his back as King Kong. After all, even King Kong had his tender moments, Dahlia told herself as she wandered through the aisle of hose nozzles. When a punk-haired young clerk asked if he could help her, she said, “I’m Louie’s cousin Dahlia, and I just dropped by to say hello.” She smiled and hoped she sounded casual and sincere.

“He’s takin’ a break out back,” the clerk said. “I’ll go find him.”

Charm, charm, Dahlia said to herself, watching the punk kid head for the back of the store. Don’t bring up old family stuff. Just charm the little creep into giving you the address. After a minute she heard Louie’s voice.

“Hey, it’s my famous cousin Dahlia! You must be slumming to come down here. You still writing those bad songs that nobody wants? Maybe you stopped by to hit your old cuz for some dough?” Louie had some gray in what was left of his hair, and he was considerably rounder in the waistline than the time she’d seen him in Gelson’s.

“Whaddya say, Louie?” Dahlia said, offering him a hand to shake, since she knew a hug was out of the question. Louie shook her hand with his meaty paw. He was her father’s brother’s son, and now in middle
age he looked remarkably the way she remembered her father looking. Only he didn’t have her father’s gentle nature. At the moment he had a crossed-arm stance and a sneer of distaste on his face.

“So I know you’re not here to buy a wrench,” he said. “And you can’t be here to tell me somebody in the family died, ’cause all those poor schmucks croaked a long time ago, leaving only you and me behind.”

“And Sunny,” she reminded him.

“Yeah. Sunny. She’s not exactly what you call alive,” he said.

Dahlia shrugged, trying to look nonchalant. “So how’s it going, Louie? I was just in the neighborhood, and thought I’d pop in.”

“Still single, I see,” he said, looking at her left hand. “I’m still with Penny, and I’ve got three kids. Maniacs. They keep me working night and day in this place. No men in your life? You gay? You’re not gay.”

“Not gay. Have a boyfriend,” Dahlia said, trying to remember if she needed anything from a hardware store. Maybe she could pretend she was there because she needed something for her house. How the hell was she going to ask a question that she was certain would piss Louie off? Oh, well, screw the niceties. She’d go right for it.

“So exactly how
is
Sunny?” she tried, steeling herself. And she was right about his reaction. His eyes hardened instantly, and his mouth turned into a tight-lipped slit.

“How’s Sunny?” he said in that way that meant, I can’t believe you’re asking me that. “Sunny’s a vegetable. Just like always. Why do you want to hear
about Sunny all of a sudden? She’s been in and out of funny farms for the last twenty-five years. How do you
think
she is? Not waiting around for the Pulitzer Prize committee to call,
that
I can promise you. Not exactly at the top of her game.”

Dahlia knew this was going to be hard, but she forged ahead. “Yeah, but isn’t she out of lockup and in some halfway house now?” She remembered hearing something like that from her mother about eight years earlier. Eight years ago when her own career was flying high and she was way too busy to think about Sunny except in passing now and then.

“Some of the time, yeah. When she isn’t regressing and refusing to take the medication and talking to demons who want her to saw off pieces of her body and feed them to the neighborhood dogs. What’s it to you?”

Dahlia hesitated. She hadn’t really thought through what she was and wasn’t going to tell this nasty little beast. Certainly not that she wanted to go by the nuthouse and get Sunny to sign off on their potentially moneymaking song. That would be the kiss of death. He’d want to screw it up somehow. He’d probably say that as her brother he controlled everything that belonged to Sunny because she couldn’t be responsible for anything anymore.

“She’s in some shitty dive in San Diego,” Louie went on, “and believe me, you don’t want to go there. It would scare the crap out of you. I made the mistake of going about three years ago. Trust me, she doesn’t look like anyone you remember. And worse yet, she doesn’t have any idea who you are or what you were to her or even where she is.”

Louie pulled a feather duster out of his back pocket, and then, as if he wanted her to be sure the discussion was over, he turned, taking his eyes from Dahlia’s, and silently dusted items on nearby shelves.

No, Louie, she thought. I came here to get the address, and I am not going to budge until I get it. “Will you give me the address?” she tried. The direct approach was a good start.

Louie looked surprised. “What the hell do you want the address for? You all of a sudden got some do-gooder impulse or something? Go adopt a pet.”

A young couple was wandering through the store, and she could see that Louie’s attention was about to shift. She had to go for it immediately.

“Please, Louie. I was looking through some old photos, and I found that locket, the one that she and I exchanged years ago, and I had this rush of feeling to see her.”

Louie whirled on her now. “She’s not her. I took my kids with me last time. Why I did that, I don’t know, but it scared the livin’ shit out of them. They had seen all those gorgeous pictures of her when she was younger, and they couldn’t believe what she was like now or how she could live in that place. Kassie threw up in my car on the way home from going there! Can I find something for you?” he said, suddenly turning into Mr. Nice Store Owner, as a tall thin man in a Hawaiian shirt rounded the corner into the aisle where Louie and Dahlia stood. The man wanted a hasp, and it was obvious that Louie was happy to have a reason to leave Dahlia so he could find it for him.

“
Go adopt a pet,
” he’d said to her. Well, a song in a
movie was worth too goddamned much to her to let that little dork get in the way of her having it. Why would he take kids to a board-and-care for schizophrenics anyway? The guy was a moron. But she was going to get the address out of him somehow, and then she’d go there and find Sunny. Marty’s secretary had called that morning to say she was sending over the paperwork for the release of the song. Dahlia had to get to Sunny soon, or Marty could change his mind.

God, would it be great when the song was up there in a hot new movie. Sung by Jennifer Lopez or somebody big like that. It could win an Oscar, for God’s sake. There was no way she was leaving here without the information she needed. She’d be patient with Louie. Kiss his ass even. Whatever it took to get to Sunny, get the papers signed, and get the song sold. The customer was paying for the hasp, whatever the hell a hasp was, and some shaggy-haired young clerk wearing a Gordon Hardware T-shirt was helping a lady choose which combination lock she wanted, and Louie would be free again. Dahlia searched her brain for a way to get through to him.

The hasp-buying guy walked past her and out the door, and she approached Louie again. “So fill me in on your kids,” she said, slapping on a smile and hoping to sound as if she actually cared about his three little children whom she’d seen only once, when the third one was born and Louie and Penny had invited her to the bris.

“Ahh,” Louie said, lighting up, “they’re stars.”

It worked, Dahlia thought as a grinning Louie rattled on for a long time about the kids and their school
and their big parts in plays and their sports activities and Dahlia nodded, pretending she knew what AYSO meant and other kid stuff, and when Louie laughed while he told her about all the adorable things they said to him, Dahlia laughed, too, hoping he couldn’t tell she was faking it.

“My girls both play the piano also,” he said. “And they’re great at it. My Kassie has white-blond hair, too. Now, my Michael…he’s a demon,” Louie went on, and her forced smile made Dahlia’s face ache. In Louie’s endless stories, his son sounded as if he were the same kind of monster Louie had been at his age, and when Dahlia mentioned that, Louie seemed to soften a bit, and then he must have drifted off into the past for a minute, because eventually he said, “You and Sunny always got all the attention. I was just the little troublemaker in the background. You girls would sing and everybody was hooked. I remember how you used to climb up on the bench next to Sun and put your arm around her and then you’d start singing.”

Dahlia nodded and kept on smiling, as if she and Louie were old buddies reminiscing. Louie had a big grin on his face when he reached into a bin of hose nozzles, then held the nozzle vertically in front of his mouth as if it were a microphone. And of all the songs he could have chosen, the one that came out of his mouth gave Dahlia a stomachache.

“Stay by my side forever. Stay by my side, my friend.” He was singing it in a mock-nightclub-singer voice, enjoying his own performance, remembering every word of the song the girls had written more
than 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….” Dahlia
would 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.