Free Some Kind of Miracle by Iris R. Dart Page B

three in a very full ashtray on the railing. This is a lost cause, Dahlia thought. I should really just get back on the road to L.A. and take it like a grown-up when Seth tells me how he knew all along this wasn’tgoing to work. You do things for bad reasons, you get bad results. Everyone knows that.
    “Want to sit down?” Sunny asked, but when Dahlia looked at her face, Sunny looked past her, never making eye contact. For an instant Dahlia thought Sunny might have been talking to someone else on the porch. But there wasn’t anybody else on the porch. She could hear Oprah’s theme music coming from inside as the show broke for a commercial, and Sunny walked away and slid into a rocking chair.
    Okay. Sunny asked her to sit down. That was a good start. Maybe after a while they’d chat, and she could take out the contract and deliver the speech she’d worked on last night.
    “Sure, I’ll sit down,” Dahlia said, following Sunny and slipping into a rocking chair next to hers. Sunny rocked in the chair the way a child would, moving it vigorously back and forth, making her feet land hard on the wood porch, then lifting them as the chair moved back.
    “Do you remember my mother? Aunt Rose?” Dahlia tried. “She loved you. You sometimes wore her jewelry when you went out on a date.”
    But Sunny stared straight ahead and didn’t answer. Maybe talking about her dating was a bad idea. Aunt Ethel used to go on and on with her theory that it was while she was on a date that Sunny cracked, flipped, blew her cork, all those phrases they used behind Aunt Ruthie’s back to describe Sunny’s condition. Yes, Dahlia remembered how they all had tossed around the idea that Sunny probably lost control after being raped by some unnamed boy. The rape was a popularfamily theory, because it placed the blame on an outside force instead of on the possibility that the genes all of them had in common with her might be faulty.
    For a long time now, the only sounds were the creak of the rocking chairs and Sunny’s stomping feet, the crying out of seagulls, and the occasional rise in the voices of Oprah’s guests.
    “Do you remember that we wrote songs together?” Dahlia asked. The only answer was the flick of the lighter as Sunny lit yet another cigarette. “One of them was called ‘Stay by My Side.’” A puff of another smoke ring came out of Sunny’s rounded lips, then another, but still her eyes never met Dahlia’s. “Well, I’ve become a professional songwriter, and I can tell you it’s a tough-ass profession. Sometimes you sell one song, and then you can wait years to sell another one. So you can imagine how thrilled I was to find out that somebody, I mean somebody really big, wants to buy that song from us. The one we wrote in your mother’s house when we were kids. Isn’t that wild?”
    Sunny puffed hard on the cigarette. All right, Dahlia thought. Let’s cut the warm, fuzzy family stuff and move in for the kill. “You see, this is really a big deal in the music business. Someone actually wants to give us money for a song we wrote and use it as the title song for a movie. Millions of people could be listening to a song that we wrote. And at the end of the movie, our names will actually be on the screen. We’ll get a credit saying we wrote the song.” Now she was singing, “Stay by my side forever, stay by my side, my friend. Our love’s a perfect circle. That means it cannot end.” Sunny stared straight ahead and didn’t even glance at her.
    After a beat Sunny stubbed out the most recently lit cigarette in the ashtray next to her chair and looked at Dahlia with a raised eyebrow. “Gotta go now,” she said, and Dahlia wasn’t sure if she was saying Dahlia had to go or Sunny had to leave the porch until Sunny stood, turned, and walked into the house. Her exit was so abrupt that Dahlia let out an outraged laugh. She was being dismissed. She’d come all this way to offer this woman a deal that could provide her