One
ALONE ON HIS BOAT and half drunk, the Golden Gate Bridge off to his left and Alcatraz dead ahead, Joe Wolf started to sing about having left his heart in San Francisco.
Then he suddenly threw back his head and laughed, remembering the last time he’d belted out the song, with his second wife out here on The Sea Wolf, both of them knowing the marriage was over.
“What heart?” she’d said.
Oh, he had heart, all right, and brains and balls to go with it. How did she think he ended up with his own football team and his own newspaper—by winning the goddamn lottery? He apologized to nobody, not even for the deals he’d had to cut to get what he wanted, especially when he felt, as he did tonight, as if he owned the whole city.
Did he have secrets? Who the hell didn’t have secrets? And regrets. He never talked about his biggest secret, but his biggest regret was his family. It was the way his three sons had turned out, the way they’d disappointed him. His fault? Or theirs?
Then there was his only daughter.
She was the best of them, the rising star of the family. Only she’d turned her back on him. And in that way became the biggest disappointment of all.
“I’m not like the rest of you!” she’d said the last time they fought.
Was that fight earlier this year or last year? There were so many he’d lost track. But that was when she told him she was walking away for good, and she meant it this time.
No, he thought. You were supposed to be better.
He drank Grey Goose out of the bottle. The good stuff. But worth it because he was.
Hardly any wind tonight, though. No other boats anywhere in sight, just the smell of the water and the occasional screech of California gulls, the night shining with starlight—bright enough, Joe Wolf thought, to light Wolves Stadium.
His stadium, even if it was too old now, the way they said he was.
He raised the bottle to his lips, realized it was empty, was about to go below and open another one when he heard a noise behind him.
Turned and saw who was standing there.
Shit.
Had to have been hiding below when Joe boarded.
“You?” Joe Wolf said.
“Me.”
“What the hell do you want?”
“To ask you a question.”
“So ask.”
“Simple question, really.”
“From you or him?”
“It doesn’t really matter.”
“Then get to it already,” Joe Wolf said. “I’m not getting any younger.”
“Did you think we’d wait forever for you to give up?”
“That’s it? You came all the way out here to ask me a question you should already know the answer to?”
“Pretty much.”
The boat had been at rest, rocking gently, the night suddenly still except for the lap of the water against the hull, the gulls having gone silent.
Joe Wolf turned toward the wheel now, ready to start the diesel back up and head back, his evening shot just like that.
“I’ll give up when I’m dead.”
Suddenly the voice was right behind him.
“Fine with me.”
Two
MY STAR QUARTERBACK ROLLED to his right and faked a pass, faked the closest linebacker out of his shoes and nearly his pants, then ran twenty yards untouched to the end zone. If he’d decided to keep going, he could have run untouched all the way to Sausalito.
I blew my whistle and walked toward Carlos Quintera, the linebacker who’d just blown the play. By now the varsity team at Hunters Point High, in the section of town between Hunters Point and Bayview, knew that they weren’t playing on one of those teams that ended the season with participation trophies.
I felt a smile forming on my lips. Undergrad at Cal. Stanford Law. And about to read an eighteen-year-old kid the riot act because he’d messed up at a high school football practice.
If I didn’t love football as much as I did, I would have asked myself what in the world I was doing here.
“Carlos, we’re going to need to get back to basics after that effort. Would that be all right with you?”
“Sure, Coach Jenny.”
Still smiling, I held up the ball.
“This,” I said to him, “is a football.”
“You need to stop right there, Coach,” Chris Tinelli, quarterback and captain of the team, said. “Pretty sure you’re going too fast for him.”
They all laughed. Even Carlos joined in, at least until I told him that we were going to hit the Pause button on today’s practice while he ran five laps around the field.
By now all my players had long since put their teenage male egos, and their jockness, in check enough to allow them to be coached by a woman. And they had been made completely aware, really from our first practice together, that I didn’t let shit go.
Inherited trait.
“Five laps, for real?” Carlos said.
“Or ten if we’re still having this conversation ten seconds from now.”
When practice had started in August for the Hunters Point Bears, they’d treated me like some sort of substitute teacher, thinking they really could get away with things, maybe because I was a woman. But it hadn’t taken long for me, the political science teacher at Hunters Point, to show them differently.
After today’s practice, Carlos walked over to me, helmet in hand, and said, “You know you sound like Bill Belichick when you keep telling us to do our job, right?”
I grinned at him.
“That candy-ass?”
I was the last one on the field, as always, starting to make the long walk toward the back entrance of the school, when I saw what looked like my whole team running at me, the guys still in their pads.
Chris Tinelli was the one who got to me first, out of breath, face red. Eyes red. He had his phone in his right hand.
I never brought my phone with me to practice. Once I got to the field it was all football for me, same as for my players.
“Coach Jenny,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”
“Chris, what’s wrong?”
“Your dad died. It’s all over social media.”
He looked like he might cry. Maybe I would later. Just not now. Not in front of the players. I was the coach. A tough guy.
Another inherited trait.
“How?” I said.
“They say he drowned.”
Three
DANNY WOLF STARED DOWN at the field from the floor-to-ceiling window behind his desk, watching the Wolves practice.
His general manager, Mike Sawchuck, was standing next to him. This was going to be Mike’s last year with the Wolves, even if the poor bastard didn’t know it yet. Another guy Danny’s father had hired who thought he had more tenure than a Supreme Court justice.
“Your dad loved the view from up here when this was still his office,” Sawchuck said.
Here we go, Danny thought.
Now he contemplated throwing himself out the window.
“It’s not his office anymore,” Danny said, “as often as you seem to forget that fact.”
“C’mon, Danny Boy. I know who’s calling the shots around here now.”
Danny Wolf turned to glare at him.
“How many times do I have to tell you not to call me that?”