A woman in the audience gave Neville a story from earlier that week: a mockingbird trapped overnight in her open garage exhausted itself flying in circles despite the wide-open door, until she and her husband chased it with brooms and ladders until it knocked itself out; they revived it, and it flew off unharmed. Her husband, who as a boy had once killed a lovebird with a slingshot, felt he had found a kind of redemption in freeing this one. She asks Neville what the story means, since the bird passed within inches of the open door without taking it and seemed, in its terror, to see its rescuers as tormentors — a living illustration, Neville suggests, of how people often resist the very deliverance being offered them.