Free Sisters of the Road by Barbara Wilson

them to attend anything on a regular basis—their sense of time, day to day, week to week, is so erratic. And then we had her in a prostitute’s group for a while, that’s a weekly rap group, and she seemed to be getting a lot out of it. But like I say, it was a problem getting her to come regularly, and a few months ago she dropped out. It’s not like we have any hold on her. We couldn’t make her come.”
    “Who has legal responsibility for her? Her parents?”
    “No. She was made a ward of the court the third time she was arrested. She’s been in foster homes and group homes, she was institutionalized once. It doesn’t matter, she just runs. Until the next time she’s picked up and put somewhere. Her parents gave her up as ‘incorrigible.’ The real name for kids like her isn’t runaways, it’s throwaways.”
    “What’s her background? What are her parents like?”
    Beth put her feet up on the desk. They sat there like huge pink bunnies amidst the thicket of papers. “She’s got a mother in Seattle who remarried a few years ago. I gather that was the start of the trouble. A twelve-year-old with all the problems that age has anyway—she had the feeling she lost her mother to this guy. I’ve met both of them. The mother is one of those sweet, helpless women who can be pushed around so easily—and the stepfather is just the guy to do it. Authoritarian, short-sighted, a little stupid. He wanted Trish out of the house and he’s not going to take her back. And then there’s the stepbrother.”
    Beth lit another Carlton and dragged at it futilely, trying to get enough tobacco in her lungs to make it worthwhile. The noise outside her office seemed to increase. I heard pushing and shoving and then an adult male voice, “Knock it off. Right now.”
    “Did she tell you about him? This Wayne?”
    “Wayne! But she said he was her boyfriend, not her stepbrother. She said they were in love.”
    “Yeah, I know that’s what she’d like to believe. I never met him, only heard about him, but he sounds like he’s really something: good-looking, very controlling, possessive, one of those guys .”
    She didn’t say the word with disgust, more with a bitter self-knowledge of the attraction of such men. It sounded like a past attraction.
    “I might have had more luck with Trish if it hadn’t been for him. A lot of the girls on the street aren’t really into prostitution in a big way. They come downtown, running from their parents, looking for drugs and company—and after a few days, when they’re hungry and cold and out of cash, one of their new friends tells them where it’s at, how easy it is to get into the car with one of the men cruising by. You suck or jerk him off while he drives around the block and there’s your twenty bucks. No big deal. It’s not usually until the girl’s first arrest that she takes on the whore label and starts feeling like that’s what she is. And a lot of the girls we can still help at that point, if they get out of the scene in time.
    “But someone like Trish, who was turned out by her stepbrother and really had to work the streets, well, the chances are slim she’s going to leave the life on her own. It’s become too much of what she is, and too easy to go back.”
    “Then Wayne is her pimp?” June was right.
    “Oh, he’d be the last one to call himself a pimp. All the same, that’s what he is. And not just with Trish. My suspicion is that Rosalie and a couple of other girls are—were—working for him too.”
    “But doesn’t her mother know , doesn’t she care?”
    “She might, if she weren’t married to such a jerk. I tried a couple of family counseling sessions. They were a disaster. The stepfather interrupted the mom every time she opened her mouth. And Trish didn’t say a word.”
    “I’d like to talk to the parents if I could.”
    “Sure… but don’t expect much.” Beth flipped through a Rolodex file and carefully wrote out their address. It was in