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use the right one, yanking boys by the neck with their ties, slapping students with sticks. The family welcomed both religions into the household these days but didn’t stick firmly to the rules of either, although they did celebrate all the holidays with fervor.
    Norma had met Norman when they were both working at a mental health center, and on one of their dates he’d introduced her to an ashram, where everyone wore white and looked like zombies. It was a little too weird for her. Then he introduced her to the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, New York, a retreat of workshops, family activities, and organic food in the woods, which she enjoyed. In the years since, they have visited Omega annually with their daughter, Becca, and Melissa, from Norma’s first marriage.
    Norman came downstairs looking tired. A short, spectacled, bearded man thirteen years older than Norma, he’d graduated from high school at sixteen. He had been accepted into Cornell University but had gone to City College of New York instead, earning his PhD at Rutgers University by twenty-six. He was the kind of quietly brilliant man who always seemed to be contemplating the nature of the universe, such as microscopic cell division. Once, Norma remembered, he had been so lost in thought that he’d had no idea he’d put on two neckties.
    “Do you have two minutes?” Norma asked him. “Just two minutes to move the clothes from the van?”
    A few days ago, she’d taken their daughter and a student along to haul off a mountain of clothes from a widower’s home. The grieving man had found her email address after reading about her students in the newspaper, and Norma had dropped by for about two hours, asking him totell her the stories behind many of his wife’s belongings before he let go of them forever. She’d thought that remembering would help him let go—grief therapy delivered right to his front door. But now the tweed jackets, polyester jumpsuits, worn vintage leather suitcases, and embroidered sweatshirts were cluttering up the party bus. “They’re full of dog hair, and I can’t breathe,” she told Norman, “and there’s a suitcase that smells a little funny too.”
    He nodded and went about unloading the items into a spare room, to be sifted through and donated another day, as Norma continued her tour. She explained the story behind a vase that a supervisor had given her, a thank-you for her help after his wife died of cancer. She explained the meaning behind a Mother’s Day card given to her by a student who was a marine.
    Norma seemed to have an anecdote for every ornament, every occasion, every important memory. She was a practiced storyteller. She knew when to pause for effect, when to wait for the laughter or the jaw drop. She’d figured out how to unspool her lessons inside of stories too. That was why attending one of Norma’s classes often felt like having a front-row seat at a one-woman monologue, interspersed with improv moments drawn from audience participation; she could build an entire lesson out of one student’s personal experience. You never knew what to expect from the show or its spectators. Some days it was laughter; other days, rage or tears.
    So it made sense that when it came down to her own life and loved ones, she’d catalogued all of it into a series of entertaining stories too.
    One day, Norma said she had a funny story about her Huffington Post–blogging neighbor Chris.
    “Chris very often will walk the dog, right? And this dog . . . it has this huge head on a Labrador’s body . . . a pit bull head. It just does nothing but drool. I call it Grizzle goo, it’s like this slobber that just hangs . . . sometimes she’ll walk across the street and stand in front of my house” while walking the dog.
    Norma went on to explain that when her oldest daughter, Melissa, had been a senior in high school who also played varsity basketball and sang in the choir, she and a group of friends had ended up