Free Do No Harm by Gregg Hurwitz Page B

almost twice your age."
    "I'm thirty-one and you're forty-three. That's nothing. Elizabeth Taylor has married men twenty years younger."
    "She doesn't have the same performance anxieties, I'd imagine."
    Diane played with her straw some more, poking at ice cubes. "All right," she finally said, with a slight hint of humor. "Why don't we make a deal? I won't call you on your lame-ass excuses, but when we do overlap socially, no more talk of lesions and contusion fractures."
    She extended her hand across the table and he shook it, mock formally, before settling back in his chair. He crossed his arms and fought off a grin. "So what's your middle name?" he asked.
    "Allison."
    "You like dogs or cats?"
    "Dogs."
    "What's your favorite kind of lesion?" She scowled at him, and he held up his hands defensively. "Just kidding. What do your folks do? Are they doctors?"
    "We don't all come from high-powered medical families. Not all our fathers have grand rounds auditoriums named after them."
    "It was named for my mother, actually," David said.
    Diane whistled. "What was it like growing up in that house?"
    "A lot of pimping at the dinner table. Name the eight bones of the wrist. The twelve cranial nerves. The five components of the Apgar score." He tilted his head. "My mother was chief of staff here at the NPI from '60 to '71, and she recruited a lot of the world's preeminent physicians--in all fields--to come lecture and teach at the Med Center. It wasn't uncommon for a few Nobel Prize-winning physicians to show up for dinner. The instructors and department heads that came through . . . it was truly amazing."
    "Who was the better doctor, your mother or your father?"
    "It's tough to say. They were in pretty divergent fields. My mother was a psychiatrist, my father a neurologist. My father passed away when I was young. Prostate cancer."
    "That's why you asked Pinkerton about a prostate checkup today even though he was only thirty-nine?"
    "We all have our pet illnesses, I suppose." David's mind followed some flight of reason, and he found himself saying, "My mother just went in '99."
    Diane nodded, and he was grateful she didn't offer any platitudes. He'd wanted to share the information with her, not elicit sympathy.
    A man in a wheelchair rolled slowly past, tray cradled on his atrophied knees.
    "My mother was a tough woman. All fire and ambition. I never saw her crack. Not once." David drew his hand down across his face, like a window blind. "When she was in her late sixties, she headed up the Disciplinary Review Board here. She had to call a young male nephrologist into her office to confront him about a claim made against him by a young woman. When she reprimanded him, he rose, locked the door, and beat the shit out of her. Broke two ribs." He watched Diane's slender eyebrows rise and spread. "The only thing my mother was upset about afterward was her lack of medical judgment in not being able to predict she was dealing with an unstable man." He set both hands on his tray and pushed it slightly away. "That was my mother."
    "A lot to live up to?"
    "A lot of people spend their lives trying to overcome their upbringing. I spent mine trying to fulfill it."
    "And have you?"
    "My mother was pretty disappointed when I decided to enter Emergency Medicine."
    "Why's that?"
    "If a surgeon is a glorified carpenter, an ER doc is a glorified carpenter with an inferiority complex." He laughed. "As you know, it's generally not considered the most cerebral field."
    "Your mother might have thought different if she'd seen you in action," she said. Her eyes quickly lowered. "Pardon my schoolgirlish fervor."
    "Medicine was a different thing back then. As has often been said--doctors of my parents' generation were the first for whom medicine was a science and the last for whom it was an art." Pulling a napkin from the dispenser, he wiped all the crumbs on the table into a neat line. "My mother never really forgave me for entering ER. As if it were a slight