Some Kind of Miracle Read Online Free PDF Page A

day, forever ago, when she cornered him as he was leaving his office at Artists Inc. The agency offices filled a four-story building in Beverly Hills, and Dahlia had waited for an hour in the parking lot, standing near what she knew was his car with the personalized plate STRMAKR so she could ask him what he thought of her songs.
    When he finally came down, it was about six o’clock, and when she saw him heading toward the car, she panicked, afraid he’d think she was a stalker and call security. But she took a deep breath and convinced herself she was doing the right thing. He had some overprotective assistant who always said to Dahlia on the phone, “Oops, you just missed him.” But now, at last, she had him cornered, and he was actually talking to her as he leaned up against his Mercedes.
    “What kind of someone else?” she asked while Howie clicked the remote in his hand to open the trunk of the glistening black convertible, then moseyed over and tossed his black leather briefcase inside.
    “A composer. You need a composer. I mean, your words are cool, but your melodies are…” He screwed up his face, then extended his hand and moved it back and forth in a gesture that meant “not so hot.” Then he pushed a button on the remote that made the parking lights flash and unlocked the doors with a click, and he slid into the Mercedes CLK430 convertible. Dahlia could smell the new-car smell. It was her favorite car on the road.
    She watched as Howie turned on the ignition and opened the windows, then reached up and released a handle, pushed a button. A lid opened in the back, and the top lifted and rolled slowly into the compartment revealed by the open lid.
    “I have thought about finding a partner,” she said, realizing that now that the top was down, she only had seconds left until Howie Penn would be on his way out of the parking lot. “I mean, it crosses my mind now and then….” That was a lie. She’d always been sure she could write both the words and the music. She knew she played the piano well, she knew she had ideas for songs. What made her ideas good were the stories of the songs, and those came easily to her. But the truth was, she always struggled over how to make the story sing. She hated to admit to herself that she was the word person and not the music person as well.
    “Let me give you the number of a guy I know who’s looking for a lyricist. Name’s Jamie Reiss. His tunes might be a little down-home for your lyrics. But he writes a nice melody and…”
    The end of the sentence hung in the air. “And you don’t.” Maybe Howie Penn was just trying to get rid of her and hoped that giving her this guy’s number would get her to quit bugging him with her bad songs all the time. He found Jamie Reiss’s phone number in his organizer and wrote it on the back of one of hisown business cards with a Mont Blanc pen. Then he backed the Mercedes out of the spot, and the tires squealed as he pulled away.
    Dahlia resisted calling the composer Howie Penn suggested for a week. Instead she continued to sit at the piano, trying to squeeze out a tune that had some kind of magic in it. But nothing worked. It all felt forced. She drove over to Sunset Plaza and parked in the lot behind the fancy shops and restaurants and walked up and down Sunset, hoping a tune would come to her.
    The smell of food coming from the line of restaurants made her stomach rumble, so she stopped for lunch at Chin Chin even though she couldn’t afford it, and at the next table she saw a woman in her fifties pull out a plastic accordion of pictures and show them to a woman across the table. The woman who looked at the pictures was not interested but polite. When the older woman said what she said next, Dahlia wrote it on a napkin: “My kids are my life.” Then, while she waited for her moo shu vegetables to arrive, she wrote the lyrics on a napkin. The next day she called the composer and asked if she could bring them to