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“A perfectly healthy twenty-two-year-old kid just dropped dead? He didn’t even get hit that hard on the last play.”
“Doc said he was dead before they got him into the ambulance.”
“Where’s his wife?”
“In the ambulance,” Danny said.
He turned to me, keeping his voice low.
“This is a terrible optic for us,” he said.
I looked at him.
“A terribleoptic? Forus? The kid was one of ours, Danny. And now he’s dead, not a goddamn public relations problem.”
He started to walk away. The media had been roped off, about twenty yards from where we were standing.
I grabbed my brother’s arm.
“Don’t make a scene,” he said.
“Everybody keeps telling me that.”
“What do you want from me?”
“You always wanted to be Dad,” I said. “Well, here’s your chance.”
“What does that even mean?”
I talked to him then as if he were one of my players.
“Do your job,” I said.
Nine
MY THREE BROTHERS,my father’s two wives, and I were gathered in the office of Dad’s longtime attorney, Harris Crawford, for the reading of his will. It was a big office but one that felt as small as a boxing ring once we’d been seated by Mr. Crawford’s assistant.
The atmosphere while we waited for him to finish up a conference call reminded me of family dinners when my brothers and I were growing up, today with an extra wife getting a seat at the table. It was fitting that the room really did feel to me like a ring, because my father had once described those dinners as boxing without blood.
Rachel sat on one side of the room. If my mother had moved her chair any farther away from Rachel Wolf’s, she would have been sitting outside the Museum of Modern Art, next door.
Danny turned to me.
“Two straight appearances with the family. Nice of you to wait until Dad was dead.”
“She’s here for the parting gifts,” Jack Wolf said.
“I’m not on the payroll, Jack. What’s your story?”
“At least we didn’t turn our backs on him,” Danny said.
“Only because you were afraid you might slip and fall off the gravy train?”
My two older brothers had rarely been aligned, even as kids, except when they aligned against me.
Danny was the one sitting closest to me. I angled my chair closer to his. He reflexively leaned back slightly as I did. When he was twelve and I was ten, he tripped me as I was about to score the winning basket in a driveway basketball game. After I got up, I punched him in the face.
When he went crying to dad, Joe Wolf said, “Good Lord, how many daughters do I have?”
