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THE NEXT MORNING,the front page of theSan Francisco Tribune,the paper delivered to my doorstep nice and early, wasn’t nice at all.
The front-page headline was set in the biggest type yet, at least as far as I was concerned:
WHAT AN ASS
Unfortunately, those three words didn’t just refer to my firing my coach and my general manager the night before and replacing them with Ryan Morrissey and Thomas Wolf. And it wasn’t an editorial opinion about my abilities as an owner, my judgment, or my qualifications for my current position.
Oh, those subjects were covered in the front-page commentary, all right, in one of the stories that ran below the fold.
But the headline had so much more to do with the photograph of the bare-assed woman that went with it.
The woman was me.
The nineteen-year-old me, in a ridiculous pose, my back—and backside—to the camera, a Wolves cap on my head, smiling and trying to look sexy. It was a picture that I had completely forgotten, taken one drunken night by my boyfriend when I was a freshman at Cal.
One of many he’d taken that night, as I now recalled, even though he swore he’d deleted them all after we’d broken up.
Now here was the money shot, on the front page of theSan Francisco Tribune.
I sat at the kitchen table staring at it and my younger self. What was that thing people always ask you? If you could go back in time, what would you say to your teenage self?
I knew the answer now.
I could hear my phone buzzing from my bedroom nonstop, as if it were on the verge of blowing up. I left it where it was, got up and walked into the front room, pulled the drapes back just slightly, and saw the first television truck pull up out front.
Eventually I’d have to go outside. I decided to do it now. I changed into my sweat pants and a Wolves T-shirt and my ancient Cal baseball cap and went for a run. As I passed the TV reporter and her cameraman, I didn’t wait for her to shout a question at me.
I asked her a question of my own.
“Anything interesting in the papers today?”
Then I took off.
Showing them my best side one more time today before I disappeared around the corner of 3rd Street.
Twenty-Three
JACK AND DANNY WOLFwere having breakfast at the Park Grill, on Battery Street. TheTribunewas on the table between them, like a centerpiece.
“How did you find him?” Danny said to Jack.
“Let’s just say I had help.”
“From who I think?”
“A good newspaperman never reveals his sources,” Jack said.
He was seated with his back to the wall. Danny’s back was to the room. Danny looked over his shoulder now, as if wondering to whom his brother was speaking.
“Good newspaperman? Where?”
Jack sipped green tea. “Today I am.”
“You hear from our sister yet?” Danny said. He was in workout clothes, having come here straight from the gym.
“I haven’t spoken to her since the reading of the will. You know Jenny. She likes to keep you off balance.”
“Only now she’s the one off balance,” Danny said. “Or maybe down for the count. Bare-assed on the front page of the paper. I wonder what Mom thinks.”
