Beth capped her pink highlighter and uncapped a green one, tested its tip against her finger. “Mom, I don’t mean this in a bad way, but you are starting to remind me of Granny, when she was in the home and had Alzheimer’s. Remember? How she would say just awful things, how she never liked living in Florida, or about how Haley was on drugs?”

“But those things were true,” Janine insisted, wiping her face on a dish towel. “Granny missed Baton Rouge her whole marriage, and your cousin Haley was on drugs. Granny never had Alzheimer’s, though. She had dementia.”

“That’s not the point,” Beth said. “The point is you don’t say those things, those negative things, all the time. Out loud. A normal person doesn’t, anyway.”

Janine thought of protesting—she did not say negative things all the time—but the dish towel she had used was contaminated with onion juice, and both her eyes were now thoroughly crying. Beth was right, it had been hard for her to be normal, to feel normal, after returning from her residency session. Perhaps she would have returned to normal, the mother who gently corrected but mostly just rooted for her children in their every desire, the cheerleader mother she had been, had it not been for the thick packet of poems, or the brief email exchanges—two or more a day—with Lorraine Kominski. BE RADICAL, read the last message she’d received. But how was one to be radical?

“I’m sorry, Mom,” Beth said. “Don’t cry, Mom.”

“I’m not crying,” Janine said, rinsing her hands at the sink and patting at her cheeks. “It’s okay. I just want you to be safe.”

“I will,” said Beth. “Don’t worry about me. I can take care of myself.”

Then Janine just laughed—that was another new development, inappropriate laughter bursting forth uncontrollably—and Beth took her textbook and her laptop into the den. Janine scraped the onions into a saucepan coated in oil, turned the heat down, and left the onions browning while she went to the sunroom to check her email. She had a message from Lorraine, addressed to her whole class:

HELLO ALL. YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO TAKE A WEBINAR TONIGHT AT 6–EASTERN TIME I SUPPOSE. IT IS CALLED “MARKETING YOURSELF IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY, AN E-BOOK STRATEGY FOR WRITERS.” IT WILL BE OF LITTLE VALUE TO YOU, AS YOU ARE POETS. I HOPE YOU ARE STILL POETS, AT LEAST. SEE YOU SOON. L.

Lorraine always wrote in all caps, and always signed her emails with “L,” so Janine did the same whenever she wrote back to Lorraine. She had taken a class about email etiquette and had learned that you were supposed to take your cues from your superiors, and always be the last one to write back. So she wrote: