Tracy Flick Can't Win (Tracy Flick #2) (17)

But Alice didn’t die. She held on for nine years—surgery, chemo, more surgery, more chemo, experimental treatments, on and on—and now she was cured. It was a miracle, everyone said so, and Diane always agreed, because it was the only thing a decent person could do.





- 9 - Tracy Flick




I got up early on Saturday morning and baked a carrot cake for my daughter’s eleventh birthday. I took my time with it, spreading out on the kitchen counter, giving each task my full attention—grating the carrots, chopping the walnuts, blending the frosting with the ancient, hand-cranked eggbeater I’d inherited from my mother. I thought about her every time I used it, the way we would bake together on the weekends, especially if one of us was feeling down.

Let’s make some cupcakes, she’d say. Beats moping, right?

Sophia wasn’t around to help, which was too bad. She was at her father’s house, and I would be joining them for dinner later in the day, after I made an appearance at the football game. Jack Weede had made a point of attending every Larks home game for the past twenty years—So many ruined Saturdays, he liked to brag—and it seemed like something I should start doing now that I was campaigning for the top job, despite my lifelong hatred of football and the culture that went along with it. If it was up to me, I’d eliminate the entire sport, though I knew better than to say that out loud.

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.