At three-thirty she climbed the stairs to the offices over the Farmers’ Mercantile and went into the consulting room of Dr. Rosen. When she came down from the doctor’s office she stopped for a moment at Bell’s candy store and bought a two-pound box of mixed chocolates. She never varied the route. From Bell’s she went directly back to Castroville Street and thence to her house.

There was nothing strange about her clothing. She dressed exactly like any well-to-do Salinas woman out shopping on a Monday afternoon—except that she always wore gloves, which was unusual for Salinas.

The gloves made her hands seem puffed and pudgy. She moved as though she were surrounded by a glass shell. She spoke to no one and seemed to see no one. Occasionally a man turned and looked after her and then nervously went about his business. But for the most part she slipped past like an invisible woman.

For a number of weeks Cal followed Kate. He tried not to attract her attention. And since Kate walked always looking straight ahead, he was convinced that she did not notice him.

When Kate entered her own yard Cal strolled casually by and went home by another route. He could not have said exactly why he followed her, except that he wanted to know all about her.

The eighth week he took the route she completed her journey and went into her overgrown yard as usual.

Cal waited a moment, then strolled past the rickety gate.

Kate was standing behind a tall ragged privet. She said to him coldly, “What do you want?”

Cal froze in his steps. He was suspended in time, barely breathing. Then he began a practice he had learned when he was very young. He observed and catalogued details outside his main object. He noticed how the wind from the south bent over the new little leaves of the tall privet bush. He saw the muddy path beaten to black mush by many feet, and Kate’s feet standing far to the side out of the mud. He heard a switch engine in the Southern Pacific yards discharging steam in shrill dry spurts. He felt the chill air on the growing fuzz on his cheeks. And all the time he was staring at Kate and she was staring back at him. And he saw in the set and color of her eyes and hair, even in the way she held her shoulders—high in a kind of semi-shrug—that Aron looked very like her. He did not know his own face well enough to recognize her mouth and little teeth and wide cheekbones as his own. They stood thus for the moment, between two gusts of the southern wind.

Kate said, “This isn’t the first time you’ve followed me. What do you want?”

He dipped his head. “Nothing,” he said.

“Who told you to do it?” she demanded.

“Nobody—ma’am.”

“You won’t tell me, will you?”

Cal heard his own next speech with amazement. It was out before he could stop it. “You’re my mother and I wanted to see what you’re like.” It was the exact truth and it had leaped out like the stroke of a snake.