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her cousin take an ax to the television screen, bite the dentist until he bled, run hysterically around the amusement park at the Santa Monica Pier knocking over trash cans, turning over baby strollers with the babies still in them, destroying the dressing room in a department store where she’d gone to buy a prom dress.
    Every headache, every loss of equilibrium, every sad feeling Dahlia had made her worry that it was the onset of “the flying crazies,” as Louie called his sister’s disease, which always made Aunt Ruthie tell him to shut his big dumb face.
    Dahlia remembered the morning she was wearing the pretty sapphire ring her mother gave her, an antique that had once been worn by her grandmother on her mother’s side of the family, and Sunny spotted it on her hand.
    “Oooh, great ring!” she said. “Such a gorgeous color. Can I try it on?” Sunny took Dahlia’s hand and looked closely at the stone.
    Dahlia felt panicky. What if she let Sunny try it on and the craziness was in her hands and she passed it along to Dahlia? Dahlia hesitated and couldn’t look at her cousin, convinced at that moment that it had to be bad luck to let a crazy person wear your jewelry. Maybe the craziness could be transmitted from skin to skin. What if the instant Sunny gave her back the ring and she slid it on, she became the other crazy Gordon girl? Fast, she said to herself that day, think of an excuse.
    “It’s too tight to get off,” she lied, praying Sunny couldn’t see how guilty she felt immediately after she said it.
     
     
     
    The phone rang, and Dahlia grabbed it on the first ring.
    “Ms. Gordon?” the woman’s voice on the phone sounded vaguely familiar, but who in the hell called her “Ms. Gordon”? It had to have something to do with a bill she’d forgotten to pay.
    “Yeah. This is Dahlia Gordon.”
    “I have Marty Melman for you.” Then there was a long silence, and then there was Marty’s voice.
    “Dahlia Gordon?” he said in a formal, businesslike way he’d never used with her before.
    “Yeah. Hi, Marty,” she said, wondering why he’d called her by her first and last names. “How’re things going with the three projects?” There was a long silence.
    “Wait a second. You know me?” Marty asked in an oddly detached voice for a guy she’d been massaging for years.
    “Marty. It’s Dahlia, your masseuse.”
    Marty was quiet, trying to figure out what was going on. “Did that dumb bitch secretary dial wrong?” he asked. “I didn’t ask her to call my masseuse. She is so fucking dim-witted sometimes. Pepper! I thought I was calling some songwriter, and she called you? ”
    “I am a songwriter,” Dahlia said.
    Marty laughed. “Yeah, funny. Pepper!” he called out again.
    “I left you the CD of a song I wrote,” Dahlia said.
    Another silence. Then Marty asked, “With two kids singing?”
    “Yeah.”
    “ You wrote that song?”
    “With my cousin. That’s the two of us singing.”
    Marty’s voice was giddy now. “I’m using it in my new picture! I love it! It rocks! It’s the title song. I’m sending it out to J.Lo today.” He guffawed. “This is a killer. Dahlia the masseuse wrote a great fuckin’ song for my picture. Did I know you write songs?”
    “I mentioned it many times.”
    “Ha!” he laughed again. “This is too much. Maybe my pool man has a screenplay! Ha! And my gardener probably has a three-picture deal at Fox.” That idea really made him laugh, and Dahlia stopped herself from shrieking into his ear that she’d sold a song to a star long ago, way before she started rubbing his marshmallow of a body, but she kept her mouth shut.
    “Well,” Marty said, his laughter subsiding, “let’s see. What has to happen next? The studio is gonna want to own the publishing, so I’ll get the paperwork all together, and you can come over here and sign off on it, and then we’ll give you a nice little check, and you can quit oiling up oversexed fat guys for a while