AFTER MEGAN LEFT, I decided to call Jack myself. I thought about waiting until morning, even going over to the paper myself and doing it in person, giving myself the pleasure of seeing the look on his face when I told him to clean out his office. But I decided to get it over with and not to wait.
Either way, the pleasure would still be all mine.
I remembered a rare family dinner a few months after my father had turned over control of the paper to Jack. They’d both known by then, the newspaper business having just begun to shrink down to the size it is now, that they were going to have to start the process of cutting staff if they wanted to keep the Tribune afloat. First a little and then, if that didn’t save enough money to keep the family newspaper viable, a whole lot more.
Joe Wolf said that he should be the one, as the owner of the paper, to tell people that they were being laid off and explain whatever kind of buyouts they were being offered, even though Jack was in charge.
I remembered Jack smiling that day as he listened to our father talking about people who had given their lives to our paper and to the newspaper business. And I remembered thinking that Jack looked in that moment like a real wolf.
Lowercase.
“No worries,” he said, still smiling. “I’ve got this.”
This was different, of course. My brother would never have to worry about money another day for the rest of his life. He wouldn’t have to work again if he didn’t want to, even though I knew him well enough to know how much he loved, and needed, to be a boss. How much power, and the fear that came with it, mattered to Jack Wolf.
He’d never been much of a drinker, even in college. The strongest drug he’d ever used, as far as I knew, was weed. No, the real drug to which he’d always been addicted was power, maybe over everybody except Joe Wolf when he was still alive. Thomas had at least wanted to kick his habit for hard drugs. But as a career bully, Jack didn’t see any need to change. He liked himself just the way he was.
“This must be important,” he said when he answered the phone.
I told him then, letting him know I’d read the story about Thomas and what garbage I thought it was and with whom I was replacing him. He didn’t seem remotely surprised about Megan, just saying, “I always felt as if actually screwing me wasn’t going to be enough for her.”
There was a pause then at his end.
“You’re really doing this.”
“Not doing,” I said. “Did. Done. Past tense. You’re gone.”
“And let’s say I choose not to accept this decision because of the way my contract is written, and show up for work tomorrow morning.”
“At that point, you will be escorted out of the building by security.”
He laughed.
“Something funny here?”
“Just to me. But that happens a lot.”
There was one more pause before my brother said to me, “What the hell took you so long, you silly cow?”