Vexation Lullaby by Justin Tussing

at that.”
    â€œYou want to lecture him on manners? He’s Jimmy Cross.”
    It was all true. Ogata probably knew his MCAT scores, his shoe size, and what he’d eat for lunch.

13
    Gene had built a little deck at the top of the stairs. A pair of vintage aluminum chairs bookended a glass-topped café table. A maple hung over the place, lending it a tree-house feel.
    Inside I find a cramped kitchenette with a Formica table; beneath a skylight, a plush armchair sits on a knotted rug. In the corner, a farm quilt drapes over an iron-framed bed. The place makes me feel docile in my bones.
    After filling a water glass, I go outside to sit. A breeze twists leaves on their stems. Lawn mowers drone in the distance and for a few minutes I entertain the idea of checking the garage to see if Gene has a mower—I haven’t done yard work in so long that I almost forgot I despise it.
    In my previous life, Patricia and I shared a two-story colonial in a similar neighborhood. At night she and I had the conversations indigenous to those sorts of places. We talked about our aging parents, our disappointing friends, and whether Gabby deserved a sibling—she was a happy enough kid, but she used to follow us around the house as though we were her source of oxygen. We ended up getting her a yappy dog from the pound, a little dog with a curly red coat and a tail that appeared blurry in every photograph. Cherokee, that’s what we named him.
    Every chance he got, the dog would bolt outside to chase his sworn enemies: squirrels, kids on skateboards, and cars. We were perpetually bracing for some swift and final accident, but it never came.
    And the dog loved eating. Despite the vet’s admonishing, we fed him snacks at the table. By the time I went on the road, Cherokee was slowing down, though he was only three or so.
    I jump when I hear a jet roar overhead.
    Gene’s right: I’m still the Restless One.

14
    Peter was a regional doctor at a regional hospital. He didn’t attend to internationally recognized recording stars and he didn’t consult with medical personalities who had their own cable shows.
    He’d grown up in North Carolina, in a tourist-trap town just outside a National Forest. Judith owned a store called Natural Wonders, where she sold nugget gold, raw emeralds, and geodes. The store sat wedged between a seasonal ice cream parlor and a damp nightmare called Snake World. A Pentecostal church faced them across the street.
    He and Judith lived in an apartment above the store. At night, after finishing his homework, Peter would sit in front of the TV and split geodes that they bought in bulk from an outfit in Chihuahua.
    Where was his father?
    Judith called him the Scientist. She said he worked on magnets in New Mexico. The way she said it made Peter suspicious of magnets, of New Mexico, of the whole desert Southwest. He pictured scorpions and rattlesnakes, though the Scientist probably worked in a lab. His given name was Lawrence Brand.
    I N ELEMENTARY SCHOOL , Peter played little league. He liked the compression of the stirrup socks and those warm summer nights when the spotlights grew furry with insects. At the plate, he swung at everything; when he connected, the sound of the ball coming off the bat almost stopped his heart. Sometimes, in his excitement, he’d slide into first or else he’d leg out a blooper only to meet a teammate camped out at second. He was uncoachable. He preferred soccer, because at halftime the whole team sat together to eat orange sections.
    In middle school Peter caught someone’s attention with his score on a standardized test. He was invited to spend a week at a community college, dissecting fetal pigs and learning the math that saved the lives of the Apollo 13 astronauts.
    In high school, Peter and a kid named Anatoly Tcherepnin had the privilege of eating lunch with the AP Math teacher.
    Mrs. Bertini had been accepted into the aeronautics program