With the JBs she restrained herself. She resisted the urge to mother them, to scold and lecture: Stay in school. Protect yourself. Choose the future over the present. Leave nothing to chance. It was the only way—if you were born female, and especially if you were poor—to own your own life.
Claudia said none of these things. Instead she found them attorneys （at no cost to the patient—the lawyers were paid by the Commonwealth）。 Once a court date was set, she arranged transportation to the courthouse, a note from Dr. Gurvitch to explain the girl’s absence from school. Then she prepped the patient for her interview with the judge.
Sometimes the patient resisted. A few years back, she’d prepped a JB whose career goal was to play in the WNBA. Claudia wasn’t sure that would fly with the judge, so she suggested talking about other things—the patient’s part-time job at Lady Foot Locker, the possibility of community college. But Ana F.—a gorgeous Dominican girl from Dorchester, lanky as a supermodel—wouldn’t have it. She sat impassively in Claudia’s office, her long arms folded across her chest.
No way, man. I’m gonna play ball.
I DON’T KNOW HOW YOU CAN WORK HERE.
It was not, in Claudia’s view, an extraordinary way to make a living. On the phone and in person, she took care of patients—as many women did, as her own mother had done. The patients—pregnant or not, in crisis or not—needed information. They needed pregnancy tests, birth control pills, STD panels. They needed Depo shots, IUDs, antibiotics, pelvic exams.
She took care of patients. The rest—the angry protestors, the threats and insults—didn’t touch her. Each morning she rode the train to work. On Mercy Street she pushed her way through the crowd.
2
By the time she left work it was fully dark, the early dusk of deep winter. Traffic crept along the Methadone Mile, a grim stretch of Mass Ave studded with clinics. Panhandlers camped out at a busy intersection, holding handmade signs:
WOUNDED VETERAN
SOBER AND STRUGGLING
ANYTHING HELPS
Claudia picked her way along the icy sidewalk, into a stiff wind. When her phone rang in her pocket, she knew without looking that it was Stuart calling. She pictured him idling on the expressway in his silver Audi, part of the huffing bolus of German sedans creeping north to Andover.
“Distract me,” he said.
Stuart was a collector of distractions. His phone was loaded with podcasts, videos, e-books, and sudoku. Claudia was simply another type of content he could access, her voice amplified by the excellent Bluetooth speaker on his steering wheel. When he wasn’t consuming entertainment, he sculled the Charles and ran a biotech start-up and wrote numbingly detailed reviews of high-end audio equipment, which he posted to online forums read by other awkward men. In ten months of dating they had discovered no common interests beyond sex and dinner, a common condition among couples who’d met online.
Claudia told him about her day, the Ash Wednesday protestors. Stuart described a promising meeting with a venture capitalist. The unrelatedness of these topics made transitions impossible, so they simply took turns talking. It didn’t matter. This was just a courtesy call, to confirm their intention to continue sleeping together. Glittering repartee wasn’t the point.
The terms of their relationship were dictated by traffic. A weeknight date meant sitting in nerve-shattering gridlock, so their in-person contact was limited to alternating weekends, when Stuart’s ex-wife had the kids. Twice a month they grilled steaks at his house in the suburbs and had sex several times, a two-week supply. Claudia excelled at this type of dating. Like a city gardener who grows tiny tomatoes in clay pots, she had realistic expectations. There was a natural limit on how big such plants could grow.
They weren’t in love and never would be, but in one respect Stuart was the ideal man: late in his marriage, at his wife’s insistence, he’d had a vasectomy. Nora had already decided to leave him, he told Claudia, and was looking out for the kids’ interests: if he fathered more children with some other woman, their inheritance would be further divided at his death. His ex-wife had exhibited an adaptive behavior that favored the survival of her offspring, what mothers of every species were hardwired to do. Stuart explained this calmly, without rancor. His reaction struck Claudia as peculiar but generous, which made her like him. Combined with his inability to make her pregnant, it dramatically increased his appeal. After the STD test, they stopped using condoms. The careless sex was luxurious, like driving a car with heated seats or onboard navigation, some extravagant amenity she’d once considered unnecessary and now couldn’t live without.