Suddenly, she watched him close his eyes and swoon, his legs giving way under him. He plummeted without resistance down the stairs, head and shoulders first, landing at the bottom of the staircase in a passive, twisted heap. He was still clutching the rosary. Students and teachers rushed over. Some of the kids made catcalls and laughed. Kate raced down the steps to where Marco was, calling for the school nurse. The kid’s mouth poured blood, and one of his arms made a right angle in the wrong place. He murmured when they tried to move him but otherwise made no complaint.

Kate was called to the principal’s office. In a fit of keenly felt déjà vu, before gentle, gray-haired Principal Simmons could even question her about the incident, she bolted from the room, yelling “I’m done!”

She then gave private English lessons to foreigners, immigrants who wanted to improve their language skills in order to land better jobs or post comments on the Internet without getting heckled by creeps. Her sideline was accent augmentation, targeting those who wanted to pass as native speakers for professional or romantic reasons.

To improve their conversational skills, she asked her students to talk about their lives, and their confessions produced some of the strangest and sweetest stories of new American striving. There were three Thai sisters who wanted to expand their massage-parlor business into the gated suburbs, a Russian mail-order wife sent to learn English by her dying televangelist husband, a Peruvian car dealer who’d been in the US for twenty years and wanted to branch into Hummers.

Mr. Park, the Korean pastor across the street, had been her single dullest student. Unlike her mother, she’d never warmed to him, but he asked to hire her and the terms had been more than fair. Her tasks were simple: drive to his church twice a week and teach his staff rudimentary English, then stay on to converse with him for a couple of hours more. He swore her to secrecy, saying he didn’t want anyone to find out about his lessons. She inferred that by “anyone,” he meant his wife and daughters. His chauvinism—sexual, cultural, generational—was there in the way he sat, with his legs apart, one peasant foot perched on the seat like a pasha. It was there in the way he coughed, his open mouth exposing his tonsils for all to see. It was there in the leisurely way he scratched his balls, then slyly ran his fingers across his nose.