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By Root 860 0

wavering anger issues I have ever been more furious than I was at that moment in Bert’s crappy office, blinking up at his drop-tile popcorn ceiling, my jaw muscles straining, almost sprained, from the contortions and tensions of my face. Dana had come over after her matinee to join me for this meeting, and she laughed as I raged, broke a pencil, spluttered at the dead man’s lies, insults, hypocrisies. She patted her loony twin’s shoulder as I vowed to torpedo the whole smeared business. “His pathetic little performance, his sad-ass delusion, although that’s generous, the idea that he was insane, not just a liar.” That said, it seemed possible that by the end he thought he was Shakespeare, writing Will’s will. “I’m shocked he didn’t leave Mom his second-best bed.”

“Well, I do hate that guy,” Dana said as we left Bert’s office.

“I know. He’s dead and he’s still playing us.”

“No, no,” she laughed, down on Nicollet Mall now. “Chuck Glassow. I hate Chuck Glassow.”

“Really? You think about him at all?”

“You don’t? How can you forgive him? How many times did Dad go to jail while Chuck got off?”

Charles R. Glassow, owner of a quarter of our projected millions, did two years for the grocery store coupons tax scam and came out with fair prospects from other friends; my father was paroled after seven, mentally worse for the wear, and soon to go back in for the long one.

Before that, there was the wine. I honestly can’t remember how that one ended, and I don’t care enough about the unquestionable accuracy of this to look it up, but Chuck and my father had the idea of printing up exquisitely crafted labels for a French vineyard that didn’t exist, the promotional materials for the château and grounds, the history of the denobled family, even a pedigree of the vines, including scientific analyses of the soil and grafts. This was pre-Internet, so the arrival of an elite French red, priced above $150 a bottle, available only in small batches, preordered for the very best customers, was an unexamined boon for Minneapolitan oenophiles. The wine was a cheap American blend, chosen by Glassow and my father for its price, anonymous flavor, and unmarked corks and cork foil.

I don’t see any other explanation: Glassow’s presence in the will only confirmed what the index card had already revealed.

“Where are you going from here?” I asked Dana, a vague question, as I was desperate now to be told I was forgiven and free to move in with Petra, that Dana was happy. “What’s the latest?”

“We’re talking. I don’t know. I didn’t know there was so much wrong before all this. We have so much to sort out. Depths of misunderstandings—I can’t see to the bottom. Can’t see how it can end right. I don’t know. I think … I think she’s already seeing someone.”

“Really?”

“I wonder what Shakespeare would have made of psychopharm,” she sighed when I couldn’t find the air to form the questions I wanted to ask. “You know? We’ve taken all this crap for so many years. We’re more like everyone else when we’re on the junk, everything seems clearer and easier and less fraught, but a little less real, too. Hard to believe that would have seemed like a good idea to him. ‘Here, take this: you’ll be happy to be a glover like your dad. Here, take this: you’ll be happy to be a Protestant. Here, take this: you’ll be happy enough married to that old hag and living in Stratford.’ I don’t think so.”

“What if it was for his daughter, though?” I said. “For someone he loves. Judith has been distracted with melancholy ever since her twin brother died, she’s hanging out down by the river, making bouquets of symbolic flowers. You think Shakespeare wouldn’t run down to the apothecary for some Zoloft?”

“And some Mucedorus for his cold.”

She had a double that day—matinee and evening shows—so I dropped her at the theater, hugged her, and flew to Petra.

I came in talking, a little buzzy. “Are you going to tell her, or should I? I think she knows already, on some level. I think she senses a shift is coming. I think she’s okay with it. I think she’s going to be happy in a way. We’re