Some Kind of Miracle Read Online Free PDF Page B

you always do. You start tripping about how you’re going to sell something, and the next thing you know, you start spending the money on vacations and clothes—and then you get slapped in the face.”
    Dahlia turned away and opened the refrigerator, pretending to be looking for something. What she needed was the blast of cold air on her flushed cheeks. Seth was the one who was slapping her in the face. Why did she stay with a man who had a glass-is-half-empty mentality? Maybe when she sold the song, she’d have the confidence to end it with him and start dating some more upbeat, upscale men.

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    D ahlia was disappointed when Jamie Reiss decided to go back to Nashville to work in his wife’s father’s car dealership. He told Dahlia it had been his dream to have a song recorded and now that he’d done it, he was moving on. But the taste of success had made Dahlia determined to sell more. She went out into the world with some of her old songs and some new ones. She spent endless hours in reception room after reception room with her tapes, until some sympathetic receptionist took them and said, “We’ll get back to you,” with a look in her eyes that made Dahlia know they wouldn’t. Nobody ever did get back to her, no matter how hard she pushed.
    Once or twice someone looked at her résumé and asked, “On that song ‘My Kids Are My Life,’ are you words and music?”
    “Just words,” she said and watched them nod disappointedly.
    “Mmm. We’ll get back to you.”
    Okay, she said to herself. I get it. I hear them. I need a composer. She went to songwriting workshops so she could network, a word she hated when it was used as a verb. She even sat in dingy clubs at open-mike nights listening for composers who had lousy lyrics, hoping they would realize they needed someone like her. But none of them had the kind of tunes she thought were right for her, so she didn’t even bother to approach them.
    She met Derek at a workshop, and his tunes had promise. One evening, after she’d read some of her lyrics out loud to the enthusiastic applause of the group, he said he’d like to try to work with her. He drove up to her house in a Mustang convertible, bringing a tape recorder to their meeting, “In case,” he said, “I come up with some brilliant idea and you try to steal it.” Then he laughed as though the laugh was supposed to mean he was kidding, even though he wasn’t. Dahlia listed some of her ideas, and Derek shook his head disapprovingly the entire time. “We’re never going to work,” he said. “Maybe it’s generational.”
    She met Carol at Genghis Cohen, a Chinese restaurant in Beverly Hills where they held open-mike nights, but Carol canceled their first work session when she decided to move to Santa Fe with her artist boyfriend before she and Dahlia even tried to work together. That week Dahlia signed up for massage school. Massage seemed to fit the bill in so many waysfor her. Her time would be her own, she would meet unique people, and there was something appealing about the intimacy that developed between masseuse and clients that she felt she needed in her lonely life.
    Besides, her hands were strong and she was a good listener, and soon she built up a solid client list. Eventually it was just easier to admit to herself that writing songs was the hobby and massaging was the job. But even after she hadn’t written a song in nearly a year, and she had her massage license and a number of clients, any time she filled out any kind of form that asked for her occupation, she always wrote “songwriter.” And when someone asked her at a party, “What do you do?” she would never dream of answering, “I’m a masseuse.”
    Maybe it was embarrassing to say that massage was her career because rubbing people’s naked bodies wasn’t the high-line life she’d always imagined for herself, just the backup job she was doing temporarily. Or maybe in some secret, hopeful place inside her,