We're All Crooks, Brother

Chapter One: Matters of the Estate

The text arrived at 6:12 on a Tuesday morning in October, which was the hour Murray Gratch considered the moral high ground of the day.

FAMILY MEETING. PENNGROVE. FRIDAY THRU SUNDAY. MATTERS OF THE ESTATE WILL BE DISCUSSED. ATTENDANCE NOT OPTIONAL. — Dad

He read it over twice before sending, the way he used to review a treatment plan. Then he added a second message, because the first had struck him as insufficiently grave.

My cardiologist has used the word "arrhythmia." I will say no more.

He put the phone face down on the kitchen table, then turned it face up again in case someone replied immediately. Nobody did. It was 6:13 in the morning and two of his three children were asleep and the third, he suspected, was awake but pretending.

Murray Gratch was seventy-one years old and had spent forty of those years straightening the teeth of Penngrove, Ohio, a town of eleven thousand souls that had never entirely understood how lucky it was. He had been, by his own frequent accounting, the most successful orthodontist in the county. There was documentary evidence. In 1994 the Ohio Orthodontic Quarterly had run a two-paragraph item about his use of a modified palatal expander, and Murray had it framed in the downstairs hallway at eye level, positioned so that guests going to the bathroom had to make a choice about whether to stop and read it. Most stopped. Murray always heard them stop.

"You're up early," said Dottie, coming in with her robe belted wrong.

"I sent the text."

Dottie's hand paused halfway to the coffee pot. It was a small pause, three-quarters of a second, the kind of pause a wife of forty-six years can usually get away with. "Which text."

"The family text. About the weekend." He sat back, folded his hands over his stomach, and adopted the expression of a man announcing a merger. "They'll all come. Russell will complain, then come. Peggy will say something about energy, then come. Todd—" He waved a hand. "Todd lives eleven minutes away and will act as though he's traveling from Belgium."

"All three of them," said Dottie. "In the house."

"That's the general shape of a family weekend, yes."

"For three days."

"Two nights. Friday, Saturday. Sunday evening I'll open the envelope and Monday they'll go home changed people." He said it the way other men say and then we'll take Normandy.

Dottie poured her coffee. Her hand was steady, mostly. Behind her, through the wide doorway to the dining room, the morning light came through the front windows and landed on the china cabinet, and inside the china cabinet were one hundred and eleven porcelain figurines, and Dottie could have told you, without looking, exactly which forty-two of them were worth nine dollars apiece.

"You could just tell them what's in the will," she said.

"That would be a squandering."

"A squandering."

"Dottie." Murray leaned forward. This was his favorite kind of moment: the moment when he got to explain himself to someone who had already heard it. "When did Russell last call this house? Not texted. Called."

"He called in August about the tomatoes."

"He called about tomatoes for a restaurant. That was a purchase order with feelings attached." Murray tapped the table twice. "And Peggy sends me videos. Videos of herself. Talking to strangers. She has forty thousand strangers, Dottie, and she cannot find eight minutes for the man who paid for her retainer."

"You didn't pay for her retainer. You made it."

"I made it in a lab with my hands, which is more than paying." He sat back again, satisfied. "They've stopped paying attention. So I'm going to make paying attention profitable."

Dottie looked at him for a long moment over the rim of her mug. There were mornings she loved him so much it embarrassed her, and there were mornings — most mornings — when she watched him arrange the furniture of his own funeral and thought, with real tenderness, you are the most exhausting man in Ohio.

"Have your eggs," she said.

The arrhythmia was real, in the sense that it existed. Nine weeks earlier, Peggy had sent Murray a smartwatch for his birthday, an act of generosity she had documented in three separate posts. Murray had worn it for six days, at the end of which it had informed him, in a small polite font, that his heart rhythm was irregular. He had gone to Dr. Fricke in Columbus. Dr. Fricke had run a monitor for two weeks and then said the words benign, common, and nothing I'd lose sleep over, in that order.

Murray had heard: arrhythmia.

He had bought a seven-day pill organizer with the days printed on the lids, though his only prescriptions were a low-dose beta blocker, a statin, and a vitamin D his own daughter's company did not make. He had begun taking the stairs slowly, with one hand on the banister, even when nobody was watching, on the theory that habits should be authentic. He had started saying "if I'm still here" in the middle of sentences about the gutters.

And four weeks ago, he had driven to Norman Bickle's office on Sycamore Street and had a document drawn up, and Norman had said, "You want to leave it like that?" and Murray had said, "Just draft what I told you," and Norman, who had known Murray since the eighth grade and had a low opinion of him he had never once expressed, had shrugged and drafted what he was told.

The envelope was now in the top drawer of Murray's desk, under a tray of dental molds he had kept for reasons no one had ever successfully challenged. Manila. Sealed. Nine and a half by twelve inches of leverage.

By 7:40 the replies had come in.

Russell: What's the actual agenda here

Russell: Dad. What agenda.

Peggy: 🙏 Dad this is a big feeling. I'm going to sit with it. Also is the guest room a scent-free zone this time

Todd: I have office hours Friday until 2.

Murray read them all twice and felt the warm fizz of a plan taking hold.

"They're coming," he called toward the hallway.

"I heard," Dottie called back, from the dining room, where she was standing very still in front of the china cabinet with her hand flat against the glass, doing math.

Across town and across the state, four separate people began quietly deciding what version of themselves to bring to Penngrove.

In Columbus, Russell Gratch sat in the back office of his restaurant with a stack of envelopes he had stopped opening, and thought: the house. If it's the house, I can be out from under this by March.

In a rented condo forty minutes north, Peggy Gratch mouthed the phrase family healing intensive at her bathroom mirror and decided it had legs.

In a duplex on Fern Street in Penngrove, Todd Gratch looked at the printer-paper box on the floor of his study and thought, this is it, this is when he finally reads it.

And in a house on Willow Bend with four hundred and twelve porcelain figurines listed on a homeowner's rider for three hundred and ten thousand dollars, Dottie Gratch went upstairs, locked the bathroom door, sat on the closed lid of the toilet, and opened an app on her phone shaped like a little gold crown.

She had eleven dollars in it.

She closed the app. She opened it again. Then she went down to make Murray's eggs, over medium, no butter, the way a dying man likes them.