In loco parentis

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I’d only been with the Department for two weeks when Jeffrey Clark Smithers called for an appointment.

The fact that Smithers called first made him stand out from the crowd. The Cuyahoga County office of the Ohio Public Welfare Department wasn’t much accustomed to polite scheduling. Ecstasy addicts and teenaged mothers usually just wandered in to see me.

I assigned Smithers a case number and dragged his social security number through state records. When I retrieved the search results Smithers seemed even more unusual: he had a steady job maintaining the servos at Cuyahoga Steel, no criminal record, and no prior history of state assistance. There was no apparent reason why he needed me. Smithers seemed so unlikely a client that I suspected my supervisor, Carter McGowan, had devised him as some sort of test for me.

Smithers entered my office late on a Friday afternoon dressed in union standard issue: charcoal gray khaki work pants, matching shirt and baseball cap, and black steel-toed boots. There was dirt under his fingernails. He removed his baseball cap and offered to shake hands. My remote—the urban, Caucasian, Cuyahoga County model—gave him a firm grip in response.

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