Then one day he followed her out of the machine shop, a few steps behind her, all the way to where she had left the car. She turned to look at him, the key in her hand. The whole force of his question was concentrated in his large black eyes. He suddenly smiled, very faintly. God! He wasn’t much older than she was! She was breathless; the afternoon sun enclosed them in warmth. She left the passenger door open and got into the driver’s seat. The Catalan swung himself into the car and dropped his lunch box in the back seat.

In her room, he looked at her books. He picked up a lipstick tube on her bureau and opened it and held it to his nose. Then he said, “Your name is Annie?”

She heard a tremor in his voice. She took a step toward him, almost weeping with the desire for him to take her arms in his hands again, to feel that extraordinary breathless release where, it had seemed, body and spirit had been clasped together, the ragged rift healed. His hands rose as she drew close, then caught her arms. She forgot everything, lost in the apple and salt smell of his skin.

He came home with her every day for two weeks. They learned about each other in the late-afternoon silence of her room; he spoke little English, but enough to tell her he had been born in New Mexico in the mountains above the desert, that he was unhappy among so many people, that he was saving money to go back and buy a farm, that he had five brothers and a sister, that when she had first come to the plant, he had looked at her. “So tall, I thought,” he said, leaning on his elbow, looking down at her. “But not so tall, after all.”

They did not meet on the weekends. He lived with a married sister in Pasadena. But it was not because of that, his family, that they didn’t meet. Everything was clear between them; it was their privacy they guarded.

They hardly spoke in the machine-shop shed. And ashamed of her shame, Annie didn’t want Max to even guess that she knew the Catalan. But more important than that concern was the power of their secret—she looked up to see him in the distance, walking to his locker with a patient countryman’s walk. On her way to buy an afternoon soft drink, she saw him look up from his welding, lift the heavy protective mask for a minute as she passed.