I asked how they decide who gets to volunteer.

She said there’s a form and a check and a conversation, and that the check turns up things sometimes, and that when it does they have a meeting about it.

I said, “Do you ever say no?”

She said, “Often.”

I said, “But not always.”

And Suneeta said — and she was not talking about my grandmother, because she had no idea, she was just answering a question from a fifteen-year-old with a notebook — “We had one about four years ago that took us three meetings.