“But what did we actually talk about the next week?” I asked.
“You told me to get serious,” Marla went on, “and then I said, ‘How about when someone insults you? Doesn’t that tell you something?’ At a friends-of-the-library meeting, someone had sneered and called me ‘an armchair liberal.’ Actually,” she said, surprise still in her voice, “I don’t have any political beliefs, and I don’t have armchairs—just wing-backs. But then the man came up to me after the meeting and asked for a check for his charity, which was called Clothes Horse. He said they raised money to buy kids from poor areas of Denver new clothes and shoes for school. I told him I’d think about it. Then I came home and called the people who regulate that type of thing. Regulated. There was no Internet back then. In any event,
