Lori hadn’t heard from Freddie in about a week. She wasn’t even sure Freddie’s latest address was still the same. They didn’t talk often, but she would greet her each week, and Freddie would sign off with I’m still not dead. Lori appreciated the blunt honesty, even if her daughter’s humor could feel morbid. In her support circle, one mother had explained that people giving themselves space was part of the rhythm. “They’ll call when they want to, or when they need something,” she’d said. “Just like any other kid.”
As much as Lori worried, she tried to hold onto that thought. Every article she read painted a grimmer picture of what her child had to endure. Two months had passed since she’d heard anything other than I’m not dead. Maybe she should have called to check if Freddie was free, but Freddie wouldn’t answer, or she’d tell her not to come. Better to just show up, right?
Too late now. She finds a parking spot on a side street near her daughter’s building. A sign at the corner reads Sawyer. She snaps a photo to remember and says a quiet prayer to Saint Christopher in thanks. The apartment she recalled from her last visit was on Armitage, close to a bus stop. She prays Freddie is still there. An apartment on a busy street, distinctly urban to her. On her walk, she spots four different young women wearing jean shorts that barely concealed their bodies. Even in the mid-eighties, she wouldn’t have worn that—she wouldn’t have even known how to pull it off.
When she reaches the doorway into Freddie’s building, one of the buzzers bears a sticker that reads “DOLLBARN” in multicolored marker. Freddie’s still there. It occurs to Lori that it could say ‘doll’ for another reason, but likely not. Lori recognizes that one. One week in group they had spent a whole hour trying to parse their children’s slang.
Lori presses the buzzer for her daughter’s apartment. “Shit! Orla! Hey, babe!” Freddie’s voice crackles through the intercom. “I thought I told you to come by later, come on up.”
“It’s your mother, actually,” Lori replies, but Freddie’s voice doesn’t come back through the intercom. The door begins to buzz. The stairs toward Freddie’s apartment creak. This building is older than Lori.
When she gets to the door, Freddie’s wearing nothing but black lingerie. Her makeup is half finished, one eye glazed with silver. A beer bottle sits in her hand.
“Fuck. Hi Lori. Who died?”
“Not you, apparently. You’re not leaving in justthat, right?”
“I mean, I was about to go out, but there would have been a dress involved. Why are you here? What’s going on?”
“I was worried about you, and you weren’t calling back, so I came to make sure you’re healthy and dressed up nicely.”
“Yeah. Um. Can we, like, not stand in the hallway? Because of the underwear thing?”
“You haven’t invited me in.”
“Shit, sorry. Come in, Mom.” Freddie pivots and heads back into her apartment. “Ladies, this is my mother; we’ll be in my room.”
There’s a girl on the couch with a laptop. Lori thinks that might be a girl, at least. Her roommate Peach, whom she recognizes from the last two places, is cooking dinner. Peach has grown up a bit since Lori last saw her, trading some piercings and bright blue hair for a blonde bob.
“Hi, Missus Dugan,” Peach says, “how are you?”
“Hi Peach, I’m well, how are you?”
“Good, you know, same old job, same old problems.” Peach returns her attention to the pot, which is filling the room with a warm, comforting scent. This place feels like a home, even if there’s an unpacked duffle bag scattered across the living room. Peach had found a city job a little after Freddie and Peach moved in, steady money that helped when Freddie lost her job at the university and had to keep afloat for a while.
The girl on the laptop doesn’t look up, seeming to sink deeper into herself as Lori enters. Lori finds that a little hard to read as gratitude.
“Did you get a hotel?”
She’d followed her daughter into her bedroom. Freddie sits at a dingy vanity, retouching her makeup. She’d found the vanity in an alley, as if that was something to boast about.
“I figured I could crash on your couch,” Lori says.
“Clara’s on the couch currently, the girl out there who isn’t Peach.”
“She didn’t say hello to me.”
“Don’t take that too hard, she’s having a rough time. She’s staying with us for a while; we’ll give her a week to get back on her feet.”
“That’s very kind.” Lori means it. She should remember not to judge others.
“I could share your bed?”
“Lori…”
“We’ve done it before when you were scared of the dark.”
“Fair. But I did have plans tonight.”
Lori sits on Freddie’s bed, unsure what to say. The room feels small, mostly the vanity, the bed, and the closet.
“Sorry I just showed up.”
“You’re here, I’m alive, it’s fine.”
“Did I ruin your plans?”
“I was going dancing. If you’d rather, we could do dinner instead.”
Some of the mothers in her group would kill for an invitation like this. Diane hadn’t even attended her own son’s wedding. Lori isn’t sure if Freddie is being sarcastic. Since her transition, Freddie’s vocal fry makes it hard to read her emotions without watching her face—a face masked by mirrors and makeup, unrecognizable in the clutter of Freddie’s vanity. Lori doesn’t recognize half the products there.
“I like that silver on you; it’s nice. It brings out your eyes.”
“Thanks, Mom. I’ll be done in a second.”
“Take your time.”
Freddie pulls a dress over her head. Lori has never really seen her daughter as beautiful. It’s like a stubborn old instinct in her brain, dating back to the seventies. The dress is red with a deep plunge that emphasizes Freddie’s enhanced chest. She looks good. You wouldn’t know the truth, but she looks pretty. Like any other young woman she would judge strangers as she passed, wondering about their lives in that moment.
In the dim light she looks almost like a child. “What do you think?”
“You won’t like my opinion.”
“Too slutty?”
“That’s part of the outfit, Lori.” Lori imitates Freddie’s vocal fry. Freddie laughs, scrunching her nose, the two nostrils mirroring each other. Lori’s nose has long been uneven, the right side larger than the left—something they shared before Freddie corrected it too. “Okay, you’re right, and the dress isn’t. It’s a club dress.”
Freddie tests three more looks before settling on a white blouse paired with a simple black slip that ends in lace at the knee. She grabs chunky black heels that lift her height to six-foot-two. She slides in earrings bearing Virgin Mary imagery while she says, “So why drive five hours up here? I was just busy, Lori.”
It’s been a long week.
“You didn’t text back.”
“I forgot.”
“You have to.”
“Lori. I’m not a suicidal teenager. At some point, you’ll have to start trusting that.”
“I’m never going to stop worrying about you, kid.” Freddie spins slowly and kicks up her left leg.
She looks like the reflection Lori saw when she was twenty-five, aside from a few differences. Before graduate school, she’d considered moving to Chicago or New York. Then she hadn’t. She’d landed a job and met Frank, and then Freddie appeared, growing into a confident young woman who spoke with condescension while brushing her makeup away.
“I am alive, I am healthy, and I am full. Have you eaten yet?”
“Yeah, I grabbed something on the way in.” There wasn’t a moment when she raised Freddie that someone wasn’t eating.
“Do you want to go get drunk?”
“God, yes,” Lori says.
Clara remains hunched over her laptop as Freddie and Lori emerge into the main room. Peach has finished cooking, bowls waiting on the coffee table, a cartoon about a pig piloting an airplane on the television. Peach is smaller than Freddie but shares the same frame. If Lori wanted to, she could claim both as her daughters—two stunning girls to envy. She could boast about their grace if only they dressed a bit more modestly and stood up straighter. Clara stays reserved, though she tucks a greasy strand of hair behind her ear to wave goodbye.
As they walk onto the street a siren screams past. Lori says the Hail Mary, and Freddie does the same. It’s hot, and the city is alive.
Lori watches Freddie make her way through the streets with a cigarette between her lips. She imagines what this block might have looked like when she could have moved here: Colleen and Caitlin had fled to Chicago when everything still blazed yellow and rooms smelled of smoke. In 1990, when Freddie was the same age, this neighborhood would likely have been rough, yet rent would’ve been cheap enough for a large space. She would have bought a few rolling racks and hit the night streets in heels. Lori watches Freddie pull ahead, ascending the block. Freddie had said it was Kedzie.
“Where are we going?”
“Patti’s. It’s been a Logan staple forever, and you said you wanted to walk.”
“I did.”
She’d have been the one introducing her daughter to Patti’s, perhaps never forming a daughter at all. She allowed herself to imagine the outfits, the hair that would have been huge. The boyfriends she’d have ignored, the jobs she’d have lost. The version of Lori who moved to Chicago wore shorts in the summer and probably picked up smoking, too. Freddie tosses a cigarette butt onto the curb. She’s about to request one when a girl on the sidewalk ahead calls out to Freddie.
“Is that my freaking sister?”
Four girls, probably off to a club, pass in varied outfits. Some lean toward the masculine, others more feminine, all in ill-fitting clothes. The one who calls her daughter sister doesn’t resemble Freddie or Peach. This girl is short and muscular, bursting from a tank top that’s too small. Her head is shaved smooth. The others are taller. Lori wonders how people read Freddie—as a cis girl among trans friends, or as someone who makes her trans identity more visible by hanging with them. She wonders if she would have met any trans women in the nineties, and whether they would have wanted to be her friend.
“Baby! You didn’t get my text.”
“Clearly,” Orla says, “are you bailing? Who is this beautiful older woman?”
“This is my mom. Lori, this is my girl Orla.”
“Oh, shit. Hi Missus Dugan.” Orla looks slightly embarrassed, but she offers her hand and Lori gives it a firm shake.
“Hi, Orla, it’s a pleasure to meet you.”
“It’s wonderful to meet you; your daughter means a lot to me,” she says to Lori, then returns to Freddie. “So, what’s happening? I thought we were meeting up later because of that thing you had to take care of?”
Lori feels ignored, but that’s probably normal. This masculine girl and her crew are on a mission that has little to do with sixtysomethings.
“I was planning on sitting and having a few drinks with my mom. Sorry, babe. No mothers at the warehouse rave.”
“Well, Jenny might be there. She’s at least a little mother.”
“Shut up. I love you, I’ll call you tomorrow.”
There’s a tall girl in the back who stares a bit spitefully at Freddie. Lori resists the urge to snap at her.
They end up at a corner hangout. Freddie calls it Patti’s, though the sign simply says Old Style. The bar is basically a narrow storefront, album covers on the walls, the bar occupying most of the space.
There’s a dartboard opposite the restrooms, and Lori has to interrupt a game to hit the ATM. Lori orders a vodka soda and Freddie gets another beer.
“So, were they the original plans tonight?”
“Yeah, just a few girls. The tall one was Lana, you already met Orla. The other two were Bea and Willa.”
“Lana was giving you a look.”
“She isn’t very happy with me lately.”
“Why?”
“You can only bail for dumb reasons so many times before a girl stops thinking you’re hot and starts thinking you’re a total bitch.”
“I thought you were seeing Hank.”
“She’s tired of me too, but that’s more mutual.”
“Are you going to end it with her?”
“Maybe. We’re playing chicken with it.” Freddie smiles, though something sad sits underneath.
“I’m sorry, kid,” Lori says, relieved in a guarded way. She’s met nice people with neck tattoos before, but she doesn’t love the thought of one dating her daughter.
“Eh, it wasn’t going to last anyway.”
“So, those are your cool friends you were planning to club with?”
“Calling them cool would be a stretch, but yeah. We could join them if you want to hang with a pack of twenty-somethings at a warehouse party. Do you want to drink PBR and scale a fence?”
She isn’t being sarcastic. “It might be fun; I’ve never tried it, so I wouldn’t know.”
“Really?”
“No. I don’t want to hop a fence, kid.”
Lori abandons the ruse as soon as she says it. She doesn’t want to hop a fence. Perhaps her younger self would have, but she isn’t that girl anymore—if she ever was. Freddie is.
“I’m sorry I planned to lie to you.”
“It’s okay; you’ve done it before. That’s what daughters do, I guess.”
“You’ve lied to Doris?”
“Plenty. I even skipped church a few times.”
“Doris Dugan’s daughter? The eldest one? I thought she was a good God-fearing girl.”
“Oh, shut up.” Lori says, half laughing. “I’m just saying.”
“I wasn’t God-fearing when I was raising you, either.” “I’m sure Doris lied to her friends about why you weren’t going.”
“She said I was dealing with some demons, I think,” Lori says. “That was her excuse to her church friends. We went back in when you were six or seven.”
“I remember. God, I was so pissed about that.”
“Well, your dad and I needed a date night, and the parish school of religion was cheap childcare.”
“So you dropped me off to say swear words and misbehave.”
“I did get a lot of calls from Barb.”
“You know she told me dinosaurs weren’t real?”
“I’m sure. That woman was crazy.”
“The first in a long line of authority figures I hated.”
“I thought that was me,” Lori says, tentative.
“No, you weren’t an authority figure until I was a teenager,” Freddie says. “That was something separate.”
Lori didn’t know how to navigate Freddie’s teen years. Her father had traveled for three straight years, bouncing between few union jobs in the early ’10s. He’d spent time in Omaha, then in Afghanistan, working on bases. Lori drank in those days. Not like now. Back then, she felt as if she was trying to erase something inside her.
“I guess I’ve never apologized for those days,” Lori tries. “You haven’t. Neither have I.”
“What was it like?”
“It felt like I had to rise to the moment. Be the man of the house or something. Obviously, that didn’t sit well with my brain.”
“Do you think that’s why you ended up…”
“Ended up doing what?”
“You know. Sometimes I think that not having a male role model may have contributed to your—gender issues. You only had me, and it was more like we were roommates.”
“You weren’t exactly a good role model for womanhood either.”
“I wasn’t.”
“I think I need a smoke. Order another round?”
Freddie bolts toward the back patio like a missile. She had a way of returning to old patterns, and Lori never felt she found the right thing to say to Freddie. Ever since Freddie grew facial hair and retreated into her computer, Freddie had been furious. Lori wasn’t calm either, drinking a bottle a night, telling Freddie that if Frank didn’t shape up she might leave him. Things that no fourteen-year-old should deal with. Things Lori wasn’t ready to handle at fifty-two. Tonight marks the longest stretch they’ve managed without shouting since Freddie was twelve.
When Freddie returns, she proposes a shot, and Lori declines the Malört in favor of tequila. After the chaser, Lori feels ready to try again.
“I’m sorry. Group says I’m not supposed to bring up the gender stuff. I should just let you talk about it.”
“Freddie’s eyes widen.”
“Despite my spotty record, I am still your mother, and I’d like to be better at it.”
“You’re not bad at it.”
“I have been.”
“I thought we agreed that if I can’t make suicide jokes you can’t throw pity parties about being a bad mom.”
“I know.”
“You weren’t a bad mom. You just didn’t want to be one.” Lori still felt bad about the night she told Freddie that. It was raw and shitty and tied to the time she argued with Freddie’s uncle. Freddie had helped her clean up, and they’d been nitpicking for hours. She told Freddie she’d kept the pregnancy on a coin flip. Kept her. Freddie told her to fuck herself and went to her room after she said it. She didn’t get to tell Freddie about the parts of motherhood she loved, like when Freddie would insist that Lori stay in her bed until she fell asleep.”
“I do love being your mother, Freddie,” Lori says, now.
“Says the liar.” Freddie tilts her glass, letting beer spill down her throat. “Cut that shit out.”
“What shit?”
For a moment Lori feels pride, then Freddie deflates it. She won’t even let Lori apologize.
“The I’m-too-cool-to-care routine. I’m your mother. You have to give me some respect. I carried you inside me. I remember you as a little girl, before this whatever this is. When we still shared the same nose.”
“I had plans tonight that I canceled to spend time with you.”
“I’m sorry that talking to your mother feels like a demand. You don’t get to act like this. I raised you better, to have respect.”
“I heard the nose comment. We made an arrangement. You don’t get to talk about my body.” Freddie reaches for her purse, toward her cigarettes.
“You made a proclamation, Freddie. You can’t control me having thoughts and opinions about how my daughter lives her life and presents herself.”
“Fine. I asked you, before I got FFS, not to comment on my new face.”
“That isn’t true, Freddie. You just showed up with a new nose.”
Freddie had texted Lori about twenty-five minutes before catching the Greyhound home two Christmases ago that said I got surgery. Mention anything about it and I walk.
“What does it matter?”
“You have this need to control our relationship, Freddie. I’m your mother. I know some things.”
“You don’t know anything about my life, Lori.”
“You don’t let me! I’ve been a woman for 63 years, Freddie. I do have some insight, okay? I would like to be involved in your life and the decisions you make. I want you to thrive and I want to help.”
Lori lowers her voice and taps the bar. Freddie draws her body away, closer to herself.
“Just because I’m your daughter doesn’t mean I’m an extension of you, Lori.”
There it is—the younger Lori speaking through Freddie’s mouth. Lori had once yelled the same line through a slammed bedroom door at Doris, who had been shouting at her about something she could hardly remember. The only difference is that Freddie is quiet here.
Lori starts laughing.
“Jesus Christ, now you’re—” Freddie grimaces, “I gave up a night of—dancing with my friends to spend time with you. Isn’t that enough?”
Freddie pulls a pack from her purse, twisting it in her hands, pulling out a cigarette and putting it back.
Lori says,
“I’m not laughing at you. I’m just thinking aloud what you just said to me, the same words I said to Doris, almost the same way.”
“She probably said it to her mother too.” Freddie says, giggling at the thought of her petite, white-haired grandmother striking against anything.
“She did, but it was likely about how her mother didn’t want her to go straight from high school to the convent.” Lori says, taking another drink. Her glass is nearly empty. Then she adds, “I know that surgery… I know all of it… I know your life has been hard, and I wish I could have done more to ease it.”
“I don’t think you could have. It wasn’t easy for you either.”
“It wasn’t.”
Lori tries to keep her voice steady. Freddie’s voice already wobbles.
“I’m sorry, Mom.” She lays a gentle hand on Lori’s shoulder, and Lori leans into the touch.
“I’m sorry, Winifred.”
The bar falls quiet. The next song hasn’t been queued on the TouchTunes yet. Patti sits in the corner, reading. A delay in the baseball game on the TV shows a reviewed call. For a single, quiet moment, Lori feels as if she and Freddie have said everything they needed to say to one another.
“Do you want to do a shot?” Freddie asks. Naturally.
“Yes, it’s on you.”
“Fair. Patti!”
Freddie’s hand shoots up, bracelets dangling loosely from her wrist.
“Yeah, Freddie?”
“Shots for my mom and me?”
“You got it, this one’s on me.”
“No, Patti, I have to pay. These are ‘I was being a bitch to my mom’ shots.”
“Then you have to tip me fifty percent. My kids are assholes too, you know.”
“Fair enough.”
Patti pours the shots, and Lori watches Freddie work at it, trying to fill the hole they both felt tugging in their stomachs. Lori follows her lead. Pouring relief away beats digging for it.
A man at the bar asks if they’re sisters. Lori smiles, and Freddie laughs off the clumsy advance.
“My mom is my date tonight, buddy.”
Freddie’s warmth surprises Lori. She’s never seen her daughter this gentle, this kind. Lori’s own warmth returns, whether from genuineness or intoxication, a rush that comes at about 11, when you realize you won’t be going home soon. She doesn’t want to collapse into Freddie’s bed just yet. She wants music, the glow of lights, something close to the Chicago she’d imagined in her twenties, the house and acid records she’d once begged at the record store for. One night when Freddie’s father was overseas, Lori had lingered with Costco wine tucked under the counter while Freddie collapsed her own stomach into the toilet. When Lori was twenty-two and at home, Doris had done the same for her. Lori recalls being furious about Freddie stealing the wine, until Freddie said
“I don’t know what’s happening, but I’d like to die.”
It was teenage melodrama, and it made more sense later on. Like most things about her daughter. At the time, it scared Lori more than she could bear. The therapist would later trace it to what it was, eventually.
“Are you seeing anyone right now?” Lori asks. “For your stuff.”
“Not since I lost my insurance. I’ll get a new girl when I find a new job with insurance.”
Freddie hadn’t asked her for money in years. Even during her recent unemployment, the math of how she lived never added up, yet she had friends. Lori chose to believe that her daughter’s support network was taking care of her.
“You really have been good?”
“Yeah. I’m centered, my gig’s all right; I’ll land a real job again someday.”
“Good.”
“What about you?”
“I’m great. I spend most of my time worrying about you.” “Any professorships in the future?”
“Nobody wants an adjunct my age.”
“That isn’t true.”
“I haven’t applied anywhere recently.”
“You should. You’re capable. You deserve it.”
Freddie looks at her, elbows on the bar, smiling. Lori believes her.
Lori had earned her doctorate after Freddie had left Iowa. She’d come home for the party, looking like the Lori of twenty-two, when so many options lay ahead.
Two drinks turned into four. By the fourth, Lori was feeling the warmth of the night, just as her uncle used to say before he died.
The man who asked if they were sisters had left his wallet on the bar. He faced away, listening to his friend talk about how he’d worn the same Violent Femmes tee for a week. Lori hooked the wallet with a sly grin, nudging it to the floor. Freddie tried not to laugh, and Lori’s giggles grew louder.
Lori’s laughter pops louder as they watch the man search for his wallet. Freddie says she hasn’t seen it; she apologizes for her mother’s laughter, and she laughs along when he walks away.
When she watches Freddie light a cigarette on the street, Lori asks
“Can I get one?”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“I’ve never seen you smoke.”
“I’ve done a lot of things you’ve never seen, kid.”
After her daughter lights up, Lori looks into Freddie’s face and sees the scared little boy she never managed to shake. It’s not a pristine image; it keeps colliding with another: her own, young and unbound.
“Where are we going?”
“Home, Mom.”
“I think I want to keep dancing. Do you think your friends are still dancing?”
“I think the party hasn’t started yet—the opener is at eleven.”
“Can we go? I promise not to cramp your vibe.”
“Yeah, sure. We can go dancing, Mom. We’ll have to catch a bus here, though.”
Freddie’s grin is lighting Lori up, and it wounds her how rarely she sees that look now. Lori grins back, too.
When Freddie was younger and angrier, she’d told Lori to kill the boy she’d imagined inside her heart. She’d called the name Lori so desperately wanted to keep “dead.” It hurt. Lori never told Freddie that killing a child was not something she could demand of herself.
Freddie pauses to light another cigarette after they exit the bus, just as the crossing signal switches to orange. She grips Lori’s dress at the back to keep her from stepping into traffic.
“How much further?”
“Half a mile. You tired?”
“I’m all right. I’m excited.”
“Hey, Mom?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m sorry again. I know I didn’t make it easy to be my mother.”
“You didn’t.”
For a moment, after the light changes, Lori watches the child she could never kill cross the street.
__________________________________
From Shut Up, I Love You, I’ll Call You Tomorrow: Stories by Sloane Murphy. Used with permission of the publisher, LittlePuss Press. Copyright © 2026 by Sloane Murphy.
