I slapped the sponge against the counter hard enough to bounce it across the room. “These girls and their babies! I grew up in that neighborhood, I went to that high school. There were always some girls who got pregnant, but nothing like what I’m seeing down here now.”

Mary Ann sighed. “I know. If I knew how to stop them I would. Girls in your generation weren’t so sexually active so young, for one thing, and you had more possibilities in front of you.”

“I don’t remember too many kids in my class going to college,” I said.

She paused, catching her breath. “Not what I mean. Even the ones who only wanted to get married and raise a family down there, they knew their husbands would work, there were good jobs. Heck, there were jobs. Now no one feels they have a future. Men who used to make thirty dollars an hour at U.S. Steel are lucky to work for a quarter of that at By-Smart.”

“I tried to talk to your center, Sancia, about birth control—I mean, she already has the two babies. Her boyfriend hangs around during practice; he looks like he’s at least twenty-five, but if the word work has ever crossed his mind he’s dismissed it as something in a foreign language, probably obsolete. Anyway, I suggested if Sancia was going to stay sexually active it would help her chances in school and in life if she didn’t have any more children, but her mother came over to me the next day and told me she would yank her daughter out of basketball if I talked any more about birth control to the team, but—I can’t leave them lurching around in ignorance, can I?”

“I’d be glad if every kid in that school practiced abstinence, believe me,” Mary Ann said bluntly, “but since that’s as likely as the dinosaurs reviving, they should have reliable information about contraception. But you can’t go giving it to them unsolicited. Trouble is, Sancia’s mother goes to a Pentecostal church that believes if you use birth control you go to hell.”

“But—”

“Don’t argue with me about it, and don’t, for heaven’s sake, argue with the kids. They take their faith very seriously in those storefront churches. You see them reading their Bibles before practice?”

“Another change from my youth,” I said wryly, “the mass defection of Latinos from mass. I’ve read about it, of course, but hadn’t experienced it before. And they don’t seem to have a problem proselytizing among some of the other girls on the team—I’ve had to break that up once or twice.”