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The Wolves won the next Sunday, but the story was swallowed up, all over the country, by the story about my releasing the greatest quarterback in Wolves history, the one my father used to say was his all-time favorite player even after he allowed him to marry his only daughter.
Ted had been on a nonstop media tour since he’d gotten the word from Ryan. His boilerplate response to what had happened was this: “She finally got even with me for dumping her.” He knew it was the other way around, and I knew it was the other way around—I was the one who’d decided to end our marriage—but it didn’t seem to matter.
Now it was Sunday night. I had used some of Joe Wolf’s money to hire a private plane to fly me down to Montecito after our game and was now seated in the living room of Bobby Erlich’s lavish second home there. The league meetings would begin in LA on Monday. I’d get to address the owners on Tuesday, after my brother Danny did. I hadn’t invited him. The other owners had.
The vote would be on Wednesday.
It meant that by Wednesday night I’d be either still running the Wolves or out of business. The only football team I would be running at that point would be the Hunters Point Bears.
Bobby Erlich had been doing most of the talking, but then he always did, continuing to express his extreme displeasure about what I’d done to Ted without consulting him first.
His theme, all week long, had been consistent: after Thomas’s death I had public sentiment firmly on my side and was riding a wave of sympathy, and then I proceeded to throw it away with both hands.
“You just wouldn’t let me do my job,” he said now, “because you were too interested in doing him. Or undoing him.” He sighed. “Whatever.”
“He would have ripped our team apart once Ryan benched him for good,” I said, trying to remain patient, because I knew he genuinely wanted to help, even as he was charging me what he was charging me. “Forget that I was married to that idiot. I’ve seen it happen to other teams, and I wasn’t going to let it happen to ours.”
“So that’s your story, and you’re sticking to it,” Erlich said. “It was strictly a football decision.”
“Mostly. I’d be lying if I didn’t factor in the fact that heisa raging, self-absorbed, over-the-hill moron.”
“Yeah,” Bobby Erlich said. “He must be the only one of those in all of professional sports.”
Erlich was even more a bundle of nervous energy than usual tonight because of what was about to happen in half an hour, because of where we were about to go. The person we were about to meet.
“To borrow an expression from football,” he said, “and from your faith, it’s Hail Mary time.”
“It probably was from the start.”
His housekeeper brought us more herbal tea. Erlich said he drank this particular brand because of its calming effect on him. I told him it wasn’t working tonight.
“Jokes,” he said. “You’re killing me and my reputation, and it’s jokes I get.”
He came and sat next to me on the couch.
“You don’t have the votes—you’re aware of that, right?”
“More like something I intuited.”
“We need to turn this thing around.”
“Why I’m here,” I said. Then I sighed. “But maybe even this won’t be enough. Maybe nothing was going to be once I started getting jumped in the media every other day.”
“I don’t like to lose,” he said.
“It’s my experience that hardly anybody does.”
“It’s why you need to kill it in this interview. Kill. It. You’ve got to come across as a competent woman that powerful men won’t allow to succeed. Then let her do the rest.”
“Gonna try to be a team player.” I grinned. “Finally.”
“We have to regroup now and go back and build on the eulogy,” Bobby Erlich said. “I was just getting ready to use that big-time when you looked at your ex and did theApprenticething and told him he was fired.”
“I’m glad you find my brother dying useful, Bobby. It would have been tragic if his death had gone to waste.”
“That didn’t come out right,” he said. “But you knew who I was when you and Thomas hired me.”
He smiled helplessly.
