Lori hadn’t heard from Freddie in a week or so. She wasn’t even sure if she had her daughter’s current address. They don’t talk that much, but she says hi every week, and Freddie sends I’m still not dead. back. Lori appreciates it, even if her daughter is a little morbid. One of the mothers in her support group said they’re allowed to take their space. “They’ll call when they want to, or because they need something,” she had said. “Same as any other kid.”
As much as Lori worries, she tries to keep that in mind. All the things she reads, they paint a very hard picture of what her kid must go through. It’d been two months since she’d heard anything from her daughter other than I’m not dead. Maybe she should’ve called to see if Freddie was free, but Freddie wouldn’t have answered, or she would’ve told her not to come. Better to just show up, right?
Too late now. She finds parking on one of the side streets near her daughter’s apartment. Sign at the corner says Sawyer. She takes a picture so she can remember and says a small prayer to Saint Christopher in thanks. The apartment she remembers from her last visit is on Armitage, right near a bus stop. She hopes Freddie is still there. An apartment on the main road, very city to her. She counted four different young women on her walk that were wearing jean shorts that barely covered their bottoms. Even in the mid-eighties, she’d never wear that, she wouldn’t have even known how to pull it off.
When she arrives at the door into Freddie’s building, one of the stickers labeling the buzzers says “DOLLBARN” in multicolored marker. Freddie’s still there. The thought occurs to her that it could say ‘doll’ for another reason, but it probably doesn’t. Lori knows that one. One week in group they spent a whole hour trying to parse their children’s slang.
Lori presses the buzzer for her daughter’s apartment. “Shit! Orla! Hey, babe!” Her daughter’s voice through the tinny speaker. “I thought I told you to come by later, come on up.”
“It’s your mother, actually,” Lori responds, but her daughter’s voice doesn’t respond through the intercom. The door starts to buzz. The steps up to her daughter’s apartment creak. This building is much older than Lori.
When she gets to the door, Freddie’s wearing nothing but black lingerie. Her makeup is half-finished, one eye awash in silver. She’s got a beer bottle in her hand.
“Fuck. Hi Lori. Who died?”
“Not you, apparently. You’re not leaving in just that, right?”
“I mean, I was getting ready to go out, but there was gonna be a dress involved. Why are you here? What’s going on?”
“I was worried about you, and you weren’t calling me back, so I came here to find you healthy and in very fancy underwear.”
“Yeah. Um. Can we like, not stand in the hall? Because of the underwear thing?”
“You haven’t invited me in.”
“Shit, sorry. Come in, Lori.” Freddie turns and walks back into her apartment. “Ladies, this is my mother, we’ll be in my room.”
There’s a girl on the couch on a laptop. She thinks that’s a girl at least. Her roommate Peach, who she recognizes from the past two apartments, is cooking dinner. Peach had grown up since she last saw her, trading a few of her 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 moves her attention back to the pot she’s over, which is filling the apartment with a warm, wonderful smell. This place smells like a home, even if it does have an unpacked duffle bag scattered across the living room. Peach had gotten a job with the city a little after Freddie and Peach moved into this place. Good, steady money, which helped when Freddie lost her own job at the university and had to float for a while.
The girl on the laptop doesn’t look up at her, seeming to sink further into herself the moment Lori enters the room. It strikes Lori as a little ungrateful.
“Did you get a hotel?”
She had followed her daughter into her bedroom. Freddie’s sitting at a dingy vanity, going back to putting on her face. She found the vanity in an alley. Freddie told her that as if it was something to brag about.
“I figured I could take 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’re giving her the week before we start getting her back on her feet.”
“That’s kind of you.” Lori says, and she 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 like, I did have plans tonight.”
Lori sits on Freddie’s bed and doesn’t know what to say. This was maybe not her best idea. She realizes how small her daughter’s room is. It’s mostly just the vanity, the bed, and the closet.
“Sorry that I just showed up.”
“You’re here, I’m alive, it’s fine.”
“Did I ruin your plans?”
“I mean, I was going to go dancing. Unless you would like to go dancing with me, we could just get dinner or something instead.”
Some of the mothers in her group would kill for an invitation like this. Diane hadn’t even gone to her son’s wedding. Lori isn’t sure whether Freddie is being sarcastic. Ever since her daughter transitioned, she had this vocal fry that made it impossible for Lori to detect her emotions without looking at her face, which is obscured in the mirror, creams and powders adding color on top of it, impossible to recognize. She doesn’t recognize half the products on Freddie’s vanity.
“I like that silver on you, it’s nice. Compliments your eyes.” Lori says.
“Thanks, Lori. I’ll be done in a second.”
“Take your time.”
Freddie pulls a dress on. Lori’s never been able to see her daughter as pretty. Some old cable in her brain that’s been plugged in since the seventies. The dress is red and has a deep plunge that emphasizes her daughter’s surgically enhanced breasts. She looks good. Nobody would guess, but pretty. Like any other young woman she would judge while passing on the street, wondering what she did for work dressed like that.
In the low light she looks like a child. “What do you think?”
“You won’t like my opinion.”
“Too slutty?”
“That’s part of the outfit, Lori.” Lori switches to an impression of her daughter’s affected vocal fry. Freddie laughs and scrunches her nose, two perfectly symmetrical nostrils. Lori’s own nose had mismatched nostrils, the right bigger than the left. It was something her and Freddie shared before Freddie went under the knife for that, too. “Ok, but you’re right, and the dress isn’t. That’s a club dress.”
Freddie cycles through three more options before she settles on a white shirt under a simple black slip that ends in lace around her knees. She grabs a pair of chunky black heels that bring her to six-foot-two. She’s clipping in a pair of earrings with images of the Virgin Mary when she says “So why take a five-hour drive up? 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 will have to start trusting that.”
“I’m never going to stop worrying about you, bug.” Freddie spins around slowly and kicks up her left leg.
She looks like the mirror did when Lori was twenty-five, barring a few differences. Before grad school, when she was thinking of moving to Chicago or New York. Then she didn’t. She got a job and met Frank, and then Freddie showed up and grew into this confident young woman in front of her. Talking condescendingly while putting her makeup away.
“I am alive, I am healthy, and I am full. Have you eaten yet?”
“Yeah, I got something on the way in.” There wasn’t a moment when she was raising Freddie that one of them wasn’t eating.
“Do you want to go get drunk?”
“God, yes,” Lori says.
Clara is still hunched over a laptop when Freddie and Lori come out to the main room. Peach finished cooking, bowls in front of both of them on the coffee table, some cartoon about a pig flying an airplane on the TV. Peach is smaller than Freddie but has the same frame. If Lori wanted to, she could make a reasonable claim that they were both her daughters. Two beautiful daughters to feel insecure about. She could brag about their grace, if they’d just start dressing a little more reasonably, and remembered to stand up straight. Clara was still reserved, but she brushed a greasy mop of hair aside to wave goodbye.
When they walk out to the street there’s an ambulance speeding by. Lori says the Hail Mary and Freddie does too. It’s hot and people are out.
Lori watches Freddie make her way through the city with a cigarette in her mouth. She’s picturing how this street might have looked when she could have moved here. Like Colleen and Caitlin, who ran off to Chicago when everything was still yellow and the rooms were still filled with smoke. In 1990, when she was Freddie’s age, this part of town was probably a lot worse, but she would’ve paid nothing to rent a huge space. She would’ve gotten a few rolling clothes racks and gone out every night, in heels. She watches Freddie click ahead of her, making her way up the street. Lori thinks Freddie said it was called Kedzie.
“Where are we going?”
“Patti’s! It’s been open in Logan forever, you said you wanted to walk!”
“I did.”
She would’ve been the one introducing her daughter to bars like Patti’s. Maybe she wouldn’t have a daughter at all. She let herself picture the outfits and the giant hair she would’ve sported. The boyfriends she would’ve ignored and the jobs she would’ve gotten fired from. The version of Lori that moved to Chicago wore short shorts in the summer. She probably would’ve taken up smoking too. Freddie’s throwing a butt into the side of the street. She’s about to ask for one when a girl on the sidewalk in front of them calls out to Freddie.
“Is that my fucking sister?”
There are four girls, probably off to a club, in various outfits. Some that Lori knows are on the butch side of the spectrum, others a little more feminine, wearing mostly ill-fitting clothes. The one who calls her daughter her sister doesn’t look like her at all. Not like Peach had. This girl’s short and muscular, bursting out of a cheap tank top that’s too small for her. Her head was recently shaved, Lori can tell by how smooth it is. The other three are taller. Lori wonders if people think that Freddie is a cis girl with trans friends, or if she makes herself more obviously trans by being around them. Lori wonders if she would’ve met any trans women in the nineties, and if they would’ve 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 out and Lori takes it. Lori has a firm handshake.
“Hi, Orla, it’s nice to meet you.”
“It’s wonderful to meet you, your daughter is very important to me,” she says to Lori, then turns back to Freddie. “So, what’s going on? I thought we were going to meet you later because of that thing you had to do?”
Lori’s feeling ignored, but that’s probably normal. This masculine girl and her gaggle are on a mission. A mission that doesn’t involve sixtysomethings.
“I was feeling sitting and having a few drinks with my mom. Sorry babe. No mothers at the warehouse rave.”
“Well I mean, 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’s kinda glaring at her daughter. Lori resists the urge to snarl at this person, this girl.
They head off and end up at a corner joint. Freddie called it Patti’s, but the sign just says Old Style. The bar is essentially a hallway store front, album sleeves covering the walls, the bar itself takes up most of the real estate.
There’s a dartboard opposite the bathrooms, and Lori has to interrupt the game to go to the ATM. Lori gets a vodka soda and Freddie gets another beer.
“So, were they the original plans tonight?”
“Yeah, just some girls. The tall one was Lana, you met Orla. The other two were Bea and Willa.”
“Lana was glaring at you.”
“She’s not too happy with me these days.”
“Why?”
“You can only cancel for dumb reasons so many times before a girl stops thinking that you’re hot and starts thinking that you’re a complete bitch.”
“I thought you were seeing Hank.”
“She’s kinda sick of me too, but that’s more mutual.”
“You’re gonna dump her?”
“Maybe. We’re playing chicken with it.” Freddie smiles, but there’s something sad behind it.
“I’m sorry, bug,” Lori says, even though she’s relieved. She’s met nice people with neck tattoos before, but she didn’t love the idea of one dating her daughter.
“Eh, it was never gonna last.”
“So, those are your cool friends that you were going to the club with?”
“Calling them cool would be a stretch, but yeah. We could catch them, if you want to hang out with a bunch of twenty-somethings at a warehouse party. Do you want to drink PBR and hop a fence?”
So she wasn’t being sarcastic. “It might be fun, I’ve never done it, so I wouldn’t know.”
“Really?”
“No. I don’t want to hop a fence, bug.”
Lori gives up on the lie as soon as she tells it. She doesn’t want to hop a fence. Maybe the younger Lori would, but she is not that girl anymore, if she ever was. Freddie is.
“I’m sorry that I was planning on lying to you.”
“It’s okay, you’ve done it before. That’s what daughters do, I think.”
“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 a laugh behind her voice. “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 is 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 tentatively.
“No, you weren’t an authority figure until I was a teenager,” Freddie says. “That was something separate.”
Lori didn’t know how to talk about Freddie’s teen years. Her father was traveling for three straight years, following the few union constructions going on in the early ’10s. He spent a while in Omaha, then in Afghanistan working on military bases. Lori drank in those days. Not like she does now. Back then, she was trying to kill 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 was expected to step up. Be the man of the house or whatever. Obviously, that didn’t go over 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 strong 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 takes off for the back patio like a missile. She went and did it again. Lori hasn’t ever been able to say the right thing to Freddie. Ever since Freddie started to grow hair on her upper lip and retreated into her computer. Freddie had been so angry then. Lori wasn’t exactly calm either, killing a bottle a night, telling Freddie that if Frank didn’t shape up she might leave him. Things that no four-teen-year-old is equipped to deal with. Things that Lori wasn’t prepared to deal with at fifty-two. Tonight is the longest they’ve been able to go without yelling at each other since her daughter was twelve.
When Freddie comes back, she suggests a shot, and Lori turns down 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 the gender stuff up. I should just let you talk about it.”
“You still go to that?” 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 half-related to the shouting match that Freddie got in with one of her uncles. Freddie had been helping her clean up and they’d been sniping at each other for hours. She told Freddie that 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 tips her glass up, letting beerflow down her throat. “Cut that shit out.”
“What shit?”
For a second Lori was proud of herself, then Freddie went and ruined it. She wouldn’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 pushed you through me. I remember when you were a little girl, before whatever this is. When we still had the same nose.”
“I had plans tonight that I canceled to spend time with you.”
“I’m sorry that talking to your mother is such a demand of you. You don’t get to act like this. I raised you better, I raised you to have respect.”
“I heard the nose comment. We made an agreement. 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 what my daughter does with her life and her body.”
“Fine. I asked you, before I got FFS, to not make comments about my new face.”
“That isn’t true, Freddie. You just showed up with a new nose.”
Freddie had sent Lori a text about 25 minutes before getting off 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 fucking insight, okay? I would like to be involved in your life and the decisions you make. I would like to see you thrive and I want to help.”
Lori lowers her voice and hits the bar with her hand. Freddie’s drawing her body inward, away from Lori.
“Just because I’m your daughter doesn’t mean I’m an extension of you, Lori.”
There it is, Lori’s younger voice coming out of Freddie’s mouth. Lori had screamed the same thing through her slammed bedroom door at Doris, who had been screaming at her about something she doesn’t even remember. The only difference is that Freddie is quiet.
Lori starts laughing.
“Jesus Christ, now you’re—” Freddie grimaces, “I gave up a night of—dancing with my friends to hang out with you, isn’t that enough?”
Freddie pulls the pack out of her purse and rotates it in her hands, pulling out a cigarette and putting it back in.
Lori says
“I’m not laughing at you,” Lori says. “I just, what you just said to me, I said to Doris. Almost the same way.”
“She probably said it to her mother too.” Freddie says, laughing a little at the thought of her 5’4, white-haired grandmother rebelling against anything.
“She did, but it was most 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 almost empty. Then, she adds “I know that surgery… I know that everything… I know that your life has been hard, and I wish I could’ve done more to make it easier.”
“I don’t think you could have. It wasn’t easy for you either.”
“It wasn’t.”
Lori tries not to let her voice break. Freddie’s already has.
“I’m sorry, mom.” She puts her hand on Lori’s shoulder. Her touch is gentle, and Lori leans into it.
“I’m sorry, Winifred.”
The bar’s quiet. The next song hasn’t been put on the TouchTunes yet. Patti is in the corner, reading. There’s a delay in the baseball game on the television for a reviewed call. For one single, solitary second, Lori thinks that her and her daughter have said everything they’ve ever needed to say to one another.
“Do you want to do a shot?” Freddie asks. Except that, of course.
“Yes, it’s on you.”
“Fair. Patti!”
Freddie’s hand shoots up, silver bracelets hanging limply off 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 her daughter hard at work, filling the hole they both had just past their stomachs. Lori follows her example. Pouring dirt beats digging.
A man at the bar asks if they’re sisters. Lori smiles and Freddie laughs off his clumsy advance.
“My mom is my date tonight, buddy.”
Freddie was nicer than Lori expected. She’s never seen her daughter this gentle. She’s warm. Lori’s warm. Warm or just drunk, struck with that sudden energy that hits around 11, when you realize you won’t be going home. She doesn’t want to lay on her daughter’s bed just yet. She wants music, lights, something close to the Chicago she read about in her twenties, all those house and acid records she’d ask the guy at the record store if they had in. One night while Freddie’s father was overseas, Freddie decided to get into the Costco wine she kept under the counter. Lori sat next to her long, awkward body while Freddie unloaded her stomach into the toilet. When Lori was twenty-two and living at home, Doris had done the same for her. She remembers being pissed about Freddie stealing her wine, until Freddie said
“I don’t know what’s happening, but I’d like to die.”
It was teenaged and dramatic, and it made much more sense later on. Like most things about her daughter. At the time it’d been too scary for Lori to handle. The therapist traced 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 for a few years. Even when she was in her last long bout with unemployment. The math of how she lived never added up, but 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 alright, I’ll get a real job again at some point.”
“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 lately.”
“You should. You’re competent. You deserve it.”
Freddie looks at her, elbows on the bar, smiling. Lori believes her.
Lori got her doctorate after Freddie booked it out of Iowa. She’d come home for the party, looking like the pictures of Lori at twenty-two. When she’d had all the options ahead of her.
Two drinks turned into four. By her fourth, Lori was in her cups, like her uncle used to say before he passed.
The guy who asked them if they were sisters left his wallet on the bar. His back is turned to them, he’s listening to his friend explain the fact that he has pretty much only worn the same Violent Femmes t-shirt for the past week. Lori smirks at Freddie and slowly pushes the man’s wallet to the floor of the bar. Freddie tries not to laugh. Lori’s giggling.
Lori’s giggling gets louder while they watch the guy search for his wallet. Freddie claims she hasn’t seen it when he asks. Freddie apologizes for her mother’s laughter, joins in when he walks away.
When she watches Freddie light up 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, bug.”
After her daughter lights her cigarette, she looks into her daughter’s face and sees the scared little boy she’s never quite been able to get rid of. It’s not a perfect image. It keeps getting interrupted by another face. Her own. Young and free.
“Where are we going?”
“Home, Ma.”
“I think I want to go dancing. Do you think your friends are still out dancing?”
“I mean, I think the party hasn’t started yet, I think the first act is at 11.”
“Can we go? I promise not to cramp your style.”
“Yeah, sure. We can go dancing, Mom. We’ll have to turn here and get on the bus, though.”
Freddie’s smiling and it’s killing Lori that she rarely gets that fucking smile these days. Lori smiles too.
When Freddie was younger and angrier, she had told Lori to kill the son she had in her mind. She called the name that Lori worked so hard to choose ‘dead.’ It hurt. She never told Freddie that killing her child wasn’t something that Freddie could ask her to do.
Freddie stops to light another cigarette after they get off the bus, right as the crossing sign turns orange. She grabs the back of Lori’s dress to make sure she doesn’t continue walking into the street.
“How much further?”
“Half a mile, you tired?”
“I’m alright. I’m excited.”
“Hey, mom?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m sorry, again. I know I didn’t make it very easy to be my mother.”
“You didn’t.”
For a second, after the light changes, Lori watches the child she couldn’t 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.
