She took her second drink more quickly, and turned about the figure of the man, a tight, nervy figure with a distancing refinement, as though his body refused to join the causes of his mind.

By her third, fuller glass of gin, Max evaporated, his place taken by unknown players caught up in a painful scene of reconciliation, forgiveness, weeping. A few tears flowed down Annie’s cheeks. How good everyone was to her! Even Hannah Groops, that base Southern weed, rested an incorporeal head on Annie’s incorporeal shoulder. In the forest of her fancy, Cletus and Theda and Melvin advanced toward her with open arms.

She ate a piece of bread. But were they so good to her? Or did they only tolerate her? Did they laugh at her among themselves? Black Melvin and putty-skinned Hannah danced around her, joined together in scornful joy.

She knocked back a fourth gin; the silent actors returned, in dramas that felt more epic as they grew more incomprehensible. Figures writhed among flames, and Annie pulled them out like twigs; great clouded mirrors crashed, people fled crumbling houses. Annie moistened the lips of unknown victims with brandy. After the conflagration, in the smoky dark, Max returned. She felt her arms gripped strongly.

But it was not Max. It was the young Catalan welder, the one whose eyes so often followed her as she walked through the shed. One day, her hands clumsy, she had been trying to insert a drill in the drill press. She had been sweaty, holding the bit in her hand, twisted around her machine, when he’d walked by, come back a few steps, watched her silently, and when she’d scowled at him, ashamed of the shirt clinging to her wet back, he’d placed his hands on her arms and pressed them deeply, then released her almost at once. The touch of his hands stayed with her all that day, and every time she saw him, she felt the force of his hands and looked at them intently, as though the square brown fingers might explain why she had been so helplessly stirred when they’d clasped her arms. And it was the Catalan who followed her patiently into an alcoholic sleep.

Each day, at the plant, she sought him out with her eyes, and having assured herself he was there, kept her back turned to him whenever he came near her.