Vexation Lullaby Read Free Page B

of thick-framed reading glasses. Peter thought he recognized the roadie he’d spotted writing at the table when he’d first entered the suite.
    â€œI just ate the one.”
    â€œAnybody hassle you?”
    â€œNothing I can’t handle.” It sounded like a reasonable approximation of what Martin Vinoray might say. During the week Martin headed Internal Medicine at Rochester Memorial, but on the weekends he served as the front man for a seven-piece surf band called the Steel Retractors. Peter considered Martin his best friend.
    â€œDo you need anything? You want a something to eat, maybe a drink?”
    â€œHave you seen Mr. Cross?”
    The roadie smiled, a smirk of a smile, as thin and as crooked as an earthworm. “Man, you’re looking at him.”
    A switch flipped and everything about the man’s face became familiar, the palest blue eyes, the downturned corners of his mouth, that battering ram of a nose. The glasses were the thinnest of disguises, standard reading glasses from a drugstore spinner. A sentence wedged itself in Peter’s throat. If he so much as breathed, “You’re Jimmy fucking Cross” would come spouting from his mouth.
    â€œYou’ve got your mother’s eyebrows,” Cross said. “She was like a Jewish Frida Kahlo.”
    Judith had finally started trimming her eyebrows. The last time Peter was in Boulder, his mother had dragged him into a little shop off Pearl Street so he could watch an aesthetician tame her brows with a loop of thread.
    Sticking his hand out, Peter said, “It’s an honor to meet you.”
    Cross clasped his hand as though he were trapping a butterfly. “We’ve met before.”
    It was a ludicrous idea, but Peter decided it would be easiest to play along. He retrieved his stethoscope and a blood pressure cuff. He plucked a pair of examination gloves from a crumpled box. “Do you mind opening your shirt?”
    â€œRight to business.” Cross sounded relaxed, but Peter noticed that the singer kept opening and closing his right hand.
    â€œDid you meet Judith in Colorado?”
    â€œNot Colorado.”
    â€œNot Colorado?”
    â€œShe turned up at my farm.”
    â€œWhere’s your farm?”
    Cross, who had started to unbutton his shirt, paused. “Someone told me it’s under a Lowe’s parking lot, but I haven’t been back to check.”
    Here was something: a purple scar started at Cross’s supra sternal notch and ran down past the xiphoid process, bisecting his sternum.
    â€œSomeone crack you open?”
    Instead of looking at his chest, Cross kept his eyes on Peter. “Down in Baja I flew a three-wheeler off a limestone cliff. Busted four ribs and punctured a lung. I wound up in this whitewashed adobe hospital that looked like a Spanish mission. This Swedish doctor who’d gone down there to catch black marlin saved my life.”
    Hospitals maintained flowcharts to steer patients through their visits. Physicians and nurses gathered information according to prescribed channels; sometimes a headache pointed to dehydration and sometimes it pointed to a medulloblastoma. Medicine required structure. Doctors Without Borders was something of a misnomer—every time they helicoptered into a remote disaster, they brought borders with them, Tyvek-walled field hospitals, blue wrap, mosquito netting, even triage cards were a kind of border.
    â€œWhat else should I know about your medical history?”
    Cross pulled an electronic cigarette from his shirt pocket and set it in the bowl among the candied almonds. “I’m an open book.”
    â€œAre you on any medication?”
    â€œYou mean prescription medicine?”
    â€œExactly.”
    â€œI don’t think so.”
    Peter pointed to the vaporizer. “How long have you smoked?”
    â€œI don’t.” Cross centered the candy bowl on the table. “Someone handed me that