"I just got this image of when you do get married," Cathy says, almost winking. "You and your bride standing at the altar, passing brochures back and forth." He is serious and a little sad when he tells her to tell someone.

Sean is Cathy Jamison's brother. He prefers to be homeless because he thinks he's making a point. To Cathy, the point is that he is mentally ill. He is making this point quite strongly right now, outside a Target, screaming about the environment, dressed in rags and dirt, smelling of sweat on the first day of summer in Minneapolis. "All right," he suggests to a passerby, "When you get that plastic home, put it over your daughter's head and suffocate her with it. Because you're destroying her future!" Cathy asks her brother if he learned to be so appealing in business school. "I went to Shut The Fuck Up Technical Institute," he explains, and that he slept with the valedictorian. She asks him into the car and he says to come back with a bike, or at least a hybrid.

Cathy badgers her brother into the car. Even now, at this moment, she knows that she is lying: She isn't going to tell him. He's too close to the edge, and too close to her, and she loves him fiercely. It's more fun to play the same story out, where her brother is gross and she is uptight and they talk about couches and not about feelings and fight about life choices and not lives ending. That she's going to look into his sparkling madman's eyes and she will love him so fiercely that she will suddenly realize that she can't be cruel enough to tell him the truth. That she's saving him from pain and that only a monster could possibly wound that man, or those eyes.

At the fast-food restaurant, Sean helpfully takes a man's half-eaten meal from him before he can throw it into the garbage can, and then sits down to eat. Cathy is horrified, of course, and points out that the check was already on her. He jokes about how much she eats and talks about American waste; she respects him so much more than she respects his self-serving propaganda, but there's no way to tell a person like Sean this fact, because they think their choices are their personalities. He is much better than his choices, but if you saved a tree in a forest and nobody was there to see it, it never really happened. That part, she gets. Sean and his sister Cathy are performers.