SHORT STORY – Published in the anthology, Grace in Love, Volume X, 2023,
by Grace and Gravity, a publisher dedicated to amplifying women’s stories.

The Mom: Stephanie

Emily Post doesn’t cover this one. Stephanie actually looked it up. If your daughter, your one and only child, is coming out as a man, are you supposed to send out announcements, like a new baby or new address? From a “good manners” point of view, it would seem logical. Stephanie was always one for proper etiquette. But this? This was throwing her off her game.

“Maybe you’re going through that gender thing that all the Gen Z kids are doing?” Steph had blurted out when Jolene came down to Houston to tell them. She immediately regretted saying it.

“Mom, you’ve always known that I had issues around this.”

“I knew you might be gay, that’s all. That’s what I was prepared for tonight.”

Steph always thought of herself as extremely open-minded. She did yoga. She drank kombucha. She marched in BLM protests. She and her sister, Mary, decided together long ago that Jolene was likely gay. The girl wore dresses all through grade school. She was on the volleyball team. The idea was that she would be lipstick lesbian. Truly, the idea of Jolene shedding her entire gender never even crossed Steph’s mind.

Being a lesbian was one thing. Nobody can see that when you are walking down the street or at a family wedding, but this would be un-hidable. What about reactions from strangers? It could be actually dangerous. And what about the rest of the family – a family that had been in Texas since the Republic declared independence from Mexico in 1836?

Good lord, what about Mama? Mama was church-going, pie-baking, republican-voting old woman. How was she going to react to this?

“Maybe you could see a therapist before making such a big decision?” Steph suggested.

For a beat, Steph watched Jolene look at her father for help then back at her. John sat there like a mannequin, saying nothing, squinting to the middle distance.

Jolene looked down at the ground, then mumbled, barely audible, “I’ve been seeing a therapist ever since I graduated from college.”

That was what really hurt Steph. She had to leave the room. This was a secret; a lie of omission, kept for over three years. Why would Jolene talk to a stranger and not even consult her own mother with such an important emotional process? Weren’t they close, like Goldie Hawn and Kate Hudson? Like Lorelai and Rory? Like Nani and Lilo? The feeling of betrayal would linger for years to come.

After a few days of crying, Steph, realized something. Thanksgiving at Mama’s house in La Grange was only three weeks away. She had to deal with that, run some interference. She started a group text to everyone – leaving Jolene out – to try to ease this idea into the family dynamic.

“Just wanted to let ya’ll know that Jolene might look a bit different this year,” Steph typed. “And we should call her ‘Joe’ now.” Confused responses ran the gambit from her nephew making haircut jokes to her brother-in-law stating that that they’d always called Jolene by the name “Jo.”

Then John saw the texts and marched into the living room demanding that she stand down.

Mama didn’t reply to the texts, but she did try to call. Steph didn’t answer.

~ * ~

The Man: Jolene Joe

Mom loved to think of herself as “hip.” But just using the word “hip” made her extremely the opposite. She made a fuss over the fact that Jolene cut her hair super short during college. When she noticed the breast binding on a weekend home last summer, Jolene told her it was for her half-marathon training.

Dad wasn’t as good at denial. He figured this whole thing out months ago, when they went fishing at Lake Conroe together. He did that cowboy thing, where he didn’t say “boo” but then sent Joe a deluxe shaving kit over Amazon. Since Joe started taking T (testosterone shots), his voice was lowering and his shoulders were bulking up. He knew he had to tell them officially. He thought it would have gone better than it had.

Joe sent a text to his father a few days later asking if mom was still freaking out.

“Yup,” John had answered.

Joe texted back, “Is that all you have to say?”

“What am I supposed to say?”

“Well . . . Something. Anything.”

After several rounds of the three serpentine dots, John’s reply text appeared, “She’s gonna miss her baby girl, that’s all.”

“I ain’t dead.”

“I know that!”

More rounds of dots, that seemed to take forever.

“But Jolene is.”

~ * ~

The Cousin: Jenny

Jenny thought she knew everything about her cousin. They wore matching dresses to church camp as kids. The two of them snuck out to party all through high school. She held Jolene’s hair back the first time she threw up from getting drunk. (Bradly Harbolt had brought some kind of sweet schnapps. It tasted awful.) She knew Jolene was a bit of a tomboy, but she’d seen her date guys.

After Jenny went to Southern Methodist University and Jolene ended up in Austin for college, they’d grown apart some. But when Grandpa died, they cried together at his funeral, hanging on each other like Spanish moss on an old oak tree.

Then, Jolene stopped coming home to Houston for the summers and didn’t move back at all after college. They’d not seen each other since last Christmas, almost a year ago. Jolene’s Instagram was mostly pictures from her job at the Travis County Tourist Office, with captions that read something like, “Had fun shooting photos at Hamilton Pool,” with kids in bright bathing suits jumping off a rock into blue-green water.

Jenny didn’t. know what to think about this. It was all wrong. She called her brother.

“Bry – what is up with Jolene?”

“Have you talked to him?”

“Who? I’m talking about Cousin Jo.”

Bryan was a dolt. Always making sophomoric jokes and forever acting like he just hit puberty, even though he was the oldest of all three of them.

“Yeah. Him,” Byan pronounced the word very distinctly. “As in, J.O.E. – formerly known as Jo, J. O.”

“I . . . I can’t,” she stammered. “I don’t think. I can talk to her ever again.”

“What!?”

“It’s just not natural.”

There was silence on the line for a few seconds. Then Bryan sighed and said, “I thought Grandma Lynn might have a problem, but you? I would think you know tons of LGBTQ people in your weird theater crowd.”

Jenny resented that remark. Her colleagues are not weird. She landed her dream job in the Development office of the largest theater in Houston after graduation. They produced the classics and had corporate funding and everything. Sure, there were some homosexual men among the actors, but this was different.

“She’s changing the body that God gave her,” she pointed out. “You know they actually have double mastectomies – on purpose?”

Again, Bryan sighed.

“So did mom,” he said. “With her cancer.”

“That’s different.”

“Well, is mom any less mom? Joe’s still family, Jen.”

Jenny took a different tact, picking up on Byan’s comment about their grandmother.

“Mama Lynn is never going to accept this,” she said. “It’ll give that poor old woman a heart attack.”

~ * ~

The Matriarch: Mama Lynn

Lynn’s husband died more than six years ago. The family came up to La Grange, helped her get rid of the old tools in the shed and stuff in the bureau drawers, but she just couldn’t get herself to open his closet. When Mary went to pull out the jackets and button-up shirts, Lynn’s heart just constricted. She didn’t know why, but there was no way she could let them go.

The girls tried to convince her to move in with one of them, but Lynn wasn’t about to leave the town where all her people were buried. Besides, she had her friends all here, the church, and best of all, her docent work at the Quilt Museum.

Stephanie and Mary thought that museum was too taxing on Lynn, but the girls hadn’t even been in there since they moved away to Houston decades ago. That place kept Lynn on her toes and up-to-date.

The young person running it now made everything lively. Marta was a trans woman from Baltimore who became the executive director about ten years back. That choice by the Board was a bit of a town scandal and made some of the other volunteers quit. But her resume was amazing, with a master’s degree in Art History and work in folk-art museums. For some reason, she wanted to live in a small town. It didn’t take long to see that Marta had a heart of gold. She dressed in quiet pastels and always wore a silk scarf around her neck, like a French lady you’d see in the movies.

The thing about Marta is that she knows how to get people in the door. They actually started advertising the museum in travel magazines and in the brochures for that South by Southwest festival every spring. Then, they tricked everybody into looking at the traditional handiwork by having parties and mixing modern textile art into the galleries. It was genius.

Lynn loved the foreign tourists best. She never had the travel bug herself, but now, the whole world came to her, so she didn’t need it. She got a kick out of them, with their foreign accents. And they got a kick out of her, saying she was “real.”

“Well, everybody’s real, honey,” she’d tell them and laugh. Anyhow, playing up the down-home, Texas town charm got the museum some great donations. It’s easy to lean into it when you actually have that charm because you lived your whole life in a down-home, Texas town.

She saw the family group texts that flew around last night, with Stephanie falling all over herself trying to be tactful in saying that Jolene was going to be “Joe” now. She put in that John had taken Joe out to Men’s Warehouse to find a proper suit for the holidays, but came back empty handed.

It got Lynn to thinking about that closet again.

Before she could send a reply text, the dang phone battery died. The wall phone didn’t
die with the electricity. It seemed like a problem they got to fix. So, she tried to call Stephanie from the land line, but there was no answer.

In their bedroom, she plugged in the phone for the battery to charge back up. Then she stood there, looking at his closet door. It took her a minute, but she opened that door and proceeded to start sorting. It was easier than she thought it would be, now that she had a purpose.

When she finally got the cell phone working the next morning, she saw that Joe wasn’t in the addresses of the Steph’s text thread. She added him and texted the whole group back, carefully typing out, “Hello?” with her thumbs, the way the grandkids showed her.

After telling them she went through their father’s closet, Stephanie replied, “Oh, Mama, you should’ve waited for me and Mary to come.”

Stephanie was always so dramatic. There was no need for her daughters to make a two-hour drive just to watch her rummage around in a dusty old closet.

She texted back, “I was looking for his suits and ties from the ‘60’s.”

Mary chimed in with, “What for?”

“For Joe,” Lynn replied. “The young men wear skinny lapel jackets again. They call it ‘vintage’”

Nobody replied for a bit, so Lynn tried to sell the idea more.

“I can tailor them down to fit right,” she typed in.

Suddenly the phone rang. Lynn jumped. She wasn’t expecting that. They never seemed to actually call anymore.

“Grandma Lynn? It’s Joe.”

Lynn was relieved she could just talk instead of continuing to aggravate her arthritic fingers.

“Darlin’, I’m so glad you called!” she said. “Don’t go buying from a chain store when we got some stylish suits right here for free!”

Joe’s voice was a little shaky. “Gran, are you sure about that?”

“Well, of course. This was obviously God’s reason I couldn’t give them away before.”

She could hear that Joe had gotten all choked up. After a moment, Joe said, “Thank you, Grandma. I love you.”

“Aw, hon. I love you to pieces. There ain’t no question about that. Now, what’s your new chest measurement?”

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