Daniel and I had a week-on, week-off custody arrangement. It was an amicable situation that worked well for everyone, and created the defining rhythm of my life. I enjoyed my daughter’s company, but I savored the child-free interludes as well, when I didn’t have to cook real meals or pretend to care about The Bachelor, and could work or read or meditate in the evenings without interruption. My sex life, such as it was—infrequent “movie nights” with a widowed surgeon who was getting a little clingy—took place entirely during the weeks Sophia spent with Daniel and his wife, Margaret, and their chubby yellow Lab, Boomer.
But even if it had been my week, I doubt Sophia would have been helping out in the kitchen. We weren’t the kind of mother and daughter who baked together, or played board games, or went to garage sales on weekend mornings. To be honest, we just weren’t that close, at least not in the exclusive way I’d been with my own mother—the two of us against the world, so deeply connected it was hard to tell where one of us left off and the other began.
Maybe it would have been different if I’d raised her on my own, put a little more of my stamp on her. Maybe then we would have been a team—the Flick girls, an inseparable duo, sharing the same hopes, dreams, and heartbreaks. But Sophia was her father’s daughter too, and that had made all the difference. Like Daniel, she was sunny and easygoing, uncompetitive, a little lazy. She liked to sing and dance, but had no interest in taking lessons. She enjoyed sports, but didn’t care if she was on the A team. It had never once occurred to her that she needed to be the best, or had to prove herself to anyone, and we had no trouble figuring out where one of us left off and the other began.
* * *
Daniel was my grad school professor, a middle-aged man with a little potbelly, a dry sense of humor, and a full head of thick, silver-gray hair. He was smart and provocative, a self-proclaimed “progressive educator” who wanted to eliminate grades, abolish standardized testing, and make college tuition free for everyone. I was an AP History and Government teacher at Grover Regional, an outspoken critic of grade inflation, and an advocate for a more rigorous, back-to-basics curriculum. Daniel and I got into a lot of arguments, some of which continued long after class let out, until our cars were the only two left in the parking lot.
It wasn’t much of an affair. A couple of coffee dates, a fancy dinner, and one rainy weekend at an inn in Vermont, where we had pretty good sex in a very nice bed, but ended up in a prolonged dispute about Rudolf Steiner that consumed the rest of our stay and the entire drive home, at the end of which Daniel informed me that I was exhausting and relentless, and that he didn’t think we should see each other anymore, and I said that was fine with me.
If not for Sophia, inadvertently conceived before we drifted onto the topic of Waldorf Schools, I would have been a minor chapter in Daniel’s midlife crisis. He’d thought he wanted something different—a younger woman, a new beginning—but the time he spent with me helped him realize that his marriage was worth saving, so I guess he has two things to thank me for.
* * *
I was doing some tricky work with the piping bag when my landline rang.
“Call from… Dr. Kinder,” said the female robot on my answering machine. “Call from… Dr. Kinder.”
Ugh.
Dr. Kinder was Philip, the man I’d been seeing for the past two years, and avoiding for the past two weeks.
“Tracy,” he said, after the beep. “Sorry to bother you on your landline. I tried your cell again, but you didn’t pick up and I… Look, we really have to make a decision about Thanksgiving. My sister needs a head count.”
I liked Philip, I really did. He was smart and charming and kept himself in excellent shape for a man in his late fifties （we’d met at a 10K charity road race for cystic fibrosis, both of us running at the exact same pace）。 He was well-known and widely admired in Green Meadow—an orthopedic surgeon who had raised three kids on his own, after his wife had died of breast cancer—and I was a little annoyed by the surprise some people （some women, to be precise） expressed when they learned that we were dating.
Wow, they’d say, examining me a little more closely, as if maybe they’d missed something. Lucky you!
Lucky him, I always wanted to say, though I never did.
Philip was my first real boyfriend in ages, and the only one in my entire life who’d lasted more than a year.
Things were fine between us—light and casual—until this past summer, when he started pushing in a more serious direction, inviting me on double dates with his married friends, trying to interest me in romantic weekend getaways to Hilton Head or Nantucket, and then getting upset when I said no, or canceled at the last minute.
I want to spend more time with you, he said. Is that so crazy?
I didn’t know what to tell him. I always looked forward to our movie nights. I liked snuggling with him on the couch, and I liked having sex with him, but the minute we were done, I just wanted him to get dressed and go home. I didn’t want to cuddle and whisper in the dark, and I didn’t want him to sleep over. We’d tried that once, at his insistence, and I’d hated it, waking to the dead weight of his arm on my chest, the awkwardness of morning conversation.
“Okay,” he sighed. “Could you please call me back, Tracy? We need to make a decision.”
* * *
By the time I realized I was pregnant, Daniel and I were out of touch. I was all set to get an abortion—I didn’t think I had a choice, a single woman with a full-time job and a dissertation to write—but my mother begged me to reconsider. Her health wasn’t good, and she was worried about what would become of me when she was gone and I was alone in the world.
You’ll love your child, she told me. You won’t believe how much.
I decided to go through with it, as much for her sake as my own, though I’m not sure I admitted that to myself at the time. I thought having a grandchild might extend my mother’s life, keep her tethered to the world a little while longer. At the very least, I knew it would give her some joy, which had been in short supply for a long time.
Oh, honey, she told me. You won’t regret it. Not for a minute.
I didn’t want to tell Daniel, but again my mother disagreed. She’d always felt guilty about being a single parent, chronically short on money and time. She thought Daniel should be held accountable—made to pay his fair share—and believed my daughter would benefit from the presence of a positive male role model; she said it might save her from a lifetime of searching for father figures and mistaking them for romantic partners. It was hard for me to argue with that.
I thought Daniel would be upset by the news—he was already reconciled with Margaret at that point—but he surprised me. There were no recriminations, not even a trace of hesitation. He said of course he’d pay child support, and do whatever he could to help. He had only one condition—that he be allowed to visit his daughter and have a relationship with her.
She’s mine too, he said. I’d love to get to know her.
I was grudging at first, but single motherhood was hard, and child care insanely expensive. And then my own mother died—Sophia was only eight months old—and it was such a godsend to be able to hand the baby over to Daniel when I needed some time to myself. Margaret helped a lot too. She fell in love with Sophia, and she was always kind to me, as if I’d never done a thing to hurt her.