The catalyst for Ray’s epiphany is on page 70. “As a case in point,” wrote Peter Coyote in his autobiography, “consider Robert McNamara, sacrificing a generation of youth in Vietnam after concluding that the war was pointless, because he did not want to tarnish the dignity of the nation’s leaders by criticizing them.”

“Damn. I knew that and forgot it,” Ray says to the page. He sips his hot water and finds it lacking, but he recently gave up caffeinated beverages, and he has run out of herbal tea and lemons. It’s Sunday and he doesn’t want to use money, so Ray will make do. He’s accustomed to that.

“… I knew it when it happened and I was alive when he admitted it…” Ray continues to address the book. “But I never saw till now that we’ve been tarnishing their dignities ever since.” He stands up, pushing the metal-framed chair with the back of his legs. “Hey, Sharon,” he calls as he moves to the doorway of his cottage. “Hey, come here a minute.”

Sharon can’t hear him. She’s only about 15 feet away, across the paved patio and inside the back room of her house, windows open. But she’s running the vacuum. Her cousin Ray can hear the machine if he listens, but he’s not paying attention to anything except his thoughts right now. He’s not even aware yet that she hasn’t answered.

Sharon is pushing the do-everything attachment on the old canister machine she took from her grandparents’ home when it was sold. It was probably a good vacuum cleaner when it was new, but it is now pathetic. She has to run its bent bristles repeatedly over her rugs and floors, and even then a loose thread or feather can defeat the machine, successfully clutching the worn fibers of her cheap carpets against the weak pull. Sharon’s vacuum really doesn’t suck.

She has just finished raking the rug with the attachment and turns her attention to the painted flooring by the door to the patio when she spots something pink beneath the frame of the doorway. Hot, unnatural pink. She bends down and pulls at it with her right index fingernail. What emerges is a child’s barrette, one-piece plastic, pink with yellow, designed to hold hardly any hair. It is adorned with a picture of a fuzzy yellow chick pushing a barrow of what look to Sharon like Easter eggs, but she’s not sure, because the picture is only about two centimeters across, and the eggs or whatever are too small for Sharon’s 45 year-old eyes to examine.

That barrette may have been under the doorframe for decades, she tells herself, except the design isn’t that old. With compelling certainty she knows it came from the brown hair of her ex-stepdaughter, and she knows when. She turns off the vacuum with her foot. Her expression becomes pensive. Ray’s voice comes to her.

“Hey, Sharon…c’mere, will you?” She does.

Ray is two years older than Sharon, but lives and acts much younger. He’s 47 and still a starving student (of philosophy and religion). He spends the academic year in Boston, living a spare life off student loans, and he has taken to spending summers with Sharon, since she has taken to offering the cottage rent-free.

They didn’t grow up close; in fact, Sharon can only remember seeing Ray and his three sisters on two occasions when they were young: the death of each shared grandparent. Sharon’s inheritance from them was an old vacuum and a relationship with her cousin Ray.

As it happened, Sharon’s second divorce coincided with Ray’s arrival in Southern California ten years ago. He needed a place to live while working as a substitute third grade teacher, and she needed the bit of extra income his tenancy provided. She didn’t mind the idea of a daddy-aged male around for her son Tim either, but that was before she learned how un-daddy-like her cousin is.

“Hey, Shar…” Sharon interrupts Ray’s next summons by walking through his door. She holds the small barrette in her left hand.

“You know, Ray,” she starts, “if you really want to talk to me, you could get up and…” but he doesn’t let her finish; he rolls over the end of her sentence with “I can’t believe I’ve been so dense! Think about this: 25 years ago? when the assholes kept sending our guys to ‘Nam even though it was already a lost cause? you know? McNamara said they did that to protect the dignity of our so-called leaders. Well, look at what we’re doing now. Tearing into Clinton’s sex life. Pulling the covers off the congressmen, the judges, the mayors. In fact, we’ve been doing that ever since Watergate.” Ray’s red hair has faded to pink over the years, but his face still flushes with excitement.

“Hunh?” Sharon is distracted; she is still thinking about Nancy ten years ago. Her stepdaughter was seven then, two weeks away from ceasing to be her relative by operation of law. Pete brought Nancy by to see Sharon’s new house, and Nancy didn’t quite make it to the back patio before throwing up her breakfast. Pete and Sharon attributed Nancy’s illness to something she ate; only now does Sharon realize that the child’s body was wiser and more honest than the parents. For all the stress in Pete’s and Sharon’s marriage, it was a safer place than the home made by Nancy’s neurotic mother, it was the place where Nancy’s good friend and stepbrother Timmy lived, and it was splintering. Why not vomit? Sharon thinks Nancy lost the pink barrette on her hurried way to be sick.