The House of Wolves (House of Wolves #1)(6)

In my life, I’d never seen a game called before the clock officially ran out.

I was moving up through the stands then, pulling out the all-access pass I kept in my bag, taking the closest elevator down to the field level and the Wolves’ locker room, on my side of the stadium.

By the time I got to the runway, the ambulance was already gone. It was thirty minutes, maybe, since DeLavarious Harmon had collapsed. Some of our players were standing outside the locker room door, many still wearing their helmets. One of them was Ted Skyler, who looked at me and shook his head.

Danny Wolf was leaning against the wall next to the door, alone, eyes vacant, ashen-faced, phone in his hand.

I walked over to him.

“What happened?”

He turned and stared at me, almost as if he didn’t recognize me at first.

“What?”

“Danny, how is he?”

“He’s dead, is how he is,” my brother said.

Now I stared at him. My father had told me one time that in the history of the NFL, only one player had ever died during a game. Back in the 1970s. I don’t know why I knew his name in that moment, but for some reason I did. Chuck Hughes of the Lions. A heart condition nobody knew he had. The things you remember.

“How?” I said to my brother.

“How? He stopped breathing. That’s how.”

“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 terrible optic? For us? 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?”

It wouldn’t be the last time we’d hear a version of that line from him. And it wouldn’t be the last time I’d slug one of my brothers.

Now I said to Danny, “Do I need to break your nose again?”

“Grow up, Jenny.”

“You first.”

I wasn’t there because I expected some great windfall from my father. In all ways, that was the boat of his I felt had sailed, at least for me. It wasn’t just that I had walked away from him. It was that I had never shown any interest in the family business, even after graduating from law school. He told me I was the smartest one of his children. I told him that wasn’t my problem, it was his. Then we’d had our last argument, the granddaddy of them all. There had been no contact since. He was stubborn, and so was I. I told myself I didn’t hold grudges the way he did. But I knew it was close.

From behind me Thomas Wolf said, “Is there going to be cake?”

“All of you hush,” Elise Wolf said, in a tone of voice that always reminded me of the crack of a whip.

“Does that include me?” Rachel said from the other side of the office.

My mother, who had ignored her to this point, looked at her with enough fire and brimstone to turn her into a pillar of salt.