Free Necessary Lies by Diane Chamberlain Page A

neither mentally ill nor epileptic.”
    “What about birth control?” I thought of my pills and how lucky I’d been to get them.
    “I had the public health nurse, Ann Laing, bring her whatever she could—condoms and diaphragms and whatever, but she still got pregnant with the littlest boy, Rodney. If we ever get access to the new birth control pill, we’ll be in hog heaven, except the people out here who need it most don’t have the discipline to take a pill on a regular schedule.”
    “So how were you able to get the Eugenics Board to say yes?”
    “Ah. I finally remembered the ‘one hundred and twenty’ rule. You multiply her age, which was then thirty-three, by the number of children she has and if the result is more than one hundred twenty, she can be sterilized. Five times thirty-three and there you have it. I petitioned the board and she had a tubal ligation—that’s where they cut the fallopian tubes—after Rodney was born. She was one grateful woman, I can tell you.”
    I looked toward the long clotheslines. I was too far away to tell what was hanging from them, but I could imagine all the work this Lita Jordan had to do with a house full of boys. “Shouldn’t the father … fathers be helping out? Financially, I mean?”
    “Jane,” she said, “look at that field.”
    I did, and I suddenly saw the workers out there in a new light. They weren’t just faceless field laborers—they were men who wanted a bed and a woman at the end of the day. And Mrs. Jordan’s little house butted right up against the edge of the field where they worked.
    “It could be one of a hundred,” Charlotte said. “Or more likely five of a hundred. Life is very bleak for lots of folks out here, and you can’t blame them for taking comfort where they can find it.” Her tone was sympathetic. “Sometimes it’s in a bed. Other times in a bottle. Whatever gives them momentary pleasure, because the future doesn’t hold much promise.”
    I nodded, fanning my face with my hand and trying not to look too obvious about it. I was perspiring, but Charlotte’s flawless skin was still powder dry.
    “So.” She smiled. “You’ll discover we’ve got a lot of mothers in our caseload, and precious few fathers. Immaculate conceptions happening all over the place.”
    I laughed.
    “Always check for a man living in the house,” she said. “I don’t worry about it with Lita that much, but some women hide the fact that they’ve got a man living with them to keep the welfare checks coming in.”
    I wondered how you checked for something like that. “So what do you do for these families?” I asked. “What do we do?”
    “Plenty! We figure out how much aid they get and evaluate the family for problems that need addressing. Avery—that little Jordan boy with the vision problem—well, he’s not so little anymore.” She laughed. “He’s fifteen, but looks older. I drive him to the itinerant Braille teacher in Ridley every week unless someone from their church can take him, so you’ll be taking over that responsibility.”
    I pictured myself driving a blind teenaged boy. What would I talk to him about?
    “How do you get people to talk to you?” I thought of the intimate conversations Charlotte must have had with Lita Jordan to get her to talk about birth control.
    “You become a good listener.”
    “But … do they just automatically start talking about their personal things?”
    “You feed back what they say. They say they feel overwhelmed, you say ‘you feel overwhelmed?’ And you’ll be surprised how that opens the spigot.”
    “Really?” It sounded silly, but I figured she knew better than me what worked and what didn’t.
    “Really,” she said. “I’ll give you some books.”
    “Oh, that would be wonderful.”
    “If you’d had social-work training you’d have learned interviewing skills, but Fred and I are the only degreed social workers in the department. Gayle has a bachelor’s in psychology, so that