Kid Owner Read Online Free PDF Page B

people, all somehow related to my father, including his most recent wife and some half brother named Dillon. It blew my mind. I asked no questions, just nodded politely as my mother introduced me to some, while others she just pointed out. And when we were given seats at one end of the table facing a tall window, I barely listened to everything that was being said as they read my father’s will. My mind was spinning out of control because I couldn’t believe who my father actually was.
    Outside, a ball of late August sun glared down on the city of Dallas, melting the tar on the streets. Inside the conference room, I shivered beneath an invisible blast of frigid air. It was cold and clammy as a tomb beneath a winter freeze.
    When the lawyer said “Ryan Zinna,” every person in the room jumped like they’d been pinpricked, and they turned my way. My half brother, Dillon, stopped chewing his gum. His jaw slackened to reveal a mangled green wad draped over a line of molars and tucked next to his tongue. Dillon’s mother pinched her lips together and scowled. In her left hand was abottle of water, which she strangled until it cried out, crackling.
    I looked over at my mom just as she reached for my wrist, the way she’d do when she was about to run a yellow light in the car. I stopped her with a desperate look and a slight tilt of the head. My mom pulled back her hand and sat primly beside me in one of two dozen high-backed leather chairs surrounding the enormous conference table. Everyone wore black.
    The lawyer’s suit had tiny pinstripes so fine they might have been real strands of silver to match his cuff links. He sat at the head of the table adjusting his sleek black-and-chrome glasses and then clearing his throat before he continued to read.
    â€œTo my son, Ryan Zinna,” he said, repeating my name in the context of being the dead man’s son, so there should be no mistake, “I leave the entirety of my ownership interest in . . .”
    The lawyer looked up at me again, swallowed, and blinked in disbelief. “The Dallas Cowboys.”
    I think my mother uttered something like, “Oh, dear Lord.”
    Dillon gagged, then hocked the wad of gum onto the table where it lay like some dead sea creature, moist and alien out of its true element. His mother sucked air in through her rigid lips with the sharp hiss of a punctured tire. “No!” She slammed her palm down on the table and sprang to her feet. She stood tall and slender, quaking like a volcano. Her tan face turned purple and her pale-blue eyes glinted like ice, dancing with pins of hate-filled light.
    Dillon’s pale-blue eyes, on the other hand, brimmed with tears, and his lower lip, like the gum, morphed into a fat wad for all to see. Dillon is twelve, like me, even though he’s as tall as any fourteen-year-old. But he acted more like a ten-year-old.
    His face crinkled. “But, Mommy . . .”
    His mother slammed her water bottle onto the table. “He will not get the Cowboys!”
    It was her turn to be stared at. My mother and I weren’t the only people in the room she likely hated. My father had several brothers and they all had kids he apparently remembered with some degree of fondness or they wouldn’t be here to cash in on what the lawyer called the last will and testament of Thomas Peebles.
    The gathering had been called at the main conference room of the family office, their family office. I wasn’t family. Not to them, or, in my mind even to him . He , the dead man, was my father in name only, a wildly successful billionaire with enough spare money to own an NFL team, but without the emotional means—according to my mother—to love and be loved.
    A man you’ve seen only in pictures isn’t really a father, is he?
    â€œJasmine, please.” The lawyer hooked a finger inside the collar of his crisp white shirt and tugged it to get some air. He pointed a fat pen