“Are you hungry, Lily?” I ask, patting. Just above the band-aid I put there when she came crying with some invisible scrape she insisted I kiss and cover before we left for the courthouse.

“No,” she says after some consideration, removing and replacing a smudged thumb in her mouth.

“Are you scared?”

She pivots those brown saucer eyes toward me, so dark they remind me of coffee in need of cream. Silence.

“Do you want a cigarette? Last one in the pack.”

She nods vigorously, unblinking eyes, and I hand the six-year-old a Camel Light with the hand that isn’t holding the steering wheel for dear life. I hate to drive, especially today. She plays with the matches, and lights.

My nickname is Dairy Queen because I like to peel back half-and-half foils and drink from the thimble-sized cups. I spoon vanilla bean ice cream by the pint. Cottage cheese, yogurt, American slices, sour cream, all I eat. I suppose, like everyone, like Lily, I’m lactose intolerant, but a bellyache can’t stop me.

Back in high school, I had this notion that eating vast amount of dairy products would reroute puberty and give me the breasts I thought my body should have instead of this penis. Of course that didn’t work, the body inevitably developed hair in all the wrong places and the wrong organs in others, but my eating habits stuck. Now there are other more reliable ways to create breasts: hormones, implants.

I’m a pre-operative transsexual, nips and tucks and drugs away from being the woman I’m meant to be. I’ve always been a woman, it just requires especial effort to get the body and the rest of the world caught up. Complications.

When my sister died during childbirth, I received full custody of precious Lily. And only now that I am actually about to become a real woman, a better mother surely, the court threatens to take her away from me. Not that they can say why in so many words, they find other reasons: her smoking. A fit guardian would not supply a six-year-old with cartons and cartons of cigarettes. But Lily, you see, having spent nine months in the belly of a veritable chimney, emerged needing nicotine more than life itself, more than a mother, more than me. I never intended on letting it continue indefinitely, I’m just being delicate with the weaning.

It’s 8:30 a.m., already late, inert at every intersection’s red light, her shoes competing jewels on the dash. Such an unreasonable time of day for these blue-suited officials to summon us in to potentially separate us. I plan to tell them about the fuzzy-bunny stickers her teacher puts on every paper I then put on the fridge, how she relays her Technicolor dreams to me each morning over eggs, the way she presses her little fingers into my palm until her nails imprint a series of tiny half moons.

I think of my friend, Lenny, who successfully went through the opposite surgical/chemical progression from woman to man ten years ago, only to just be diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Like muscle memory, I suppose. The mind may go anywhere, but the body has a tendency to cling to what it once was. It was Lenny’s girlfriend who told me the news the other day on the phone, not the time to mention I may lose my little Lily.

Sweet, thumb-sucking child, who will tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth wherever it leads her, who perhaps knows more of what she’s up against than I do. I wipe fresh ash from her corduroy jumper as she pokes her head out the window crack to watch her exhaust fade into air.

“We’re almost there, Sweetpea. I’m just going to pull in here first and get gas. Do you need anything?”

I assume she’ll say “sticks” as she calls her Camels, but she stretches as far as the seatbelt will let her in my direction, blows smoke and a whispered request directly into my ear: “A strawberry milkshake, please.”

“That’s my girl,” I say, and pat that knee.