The refinery's west gate opens at six. For six weeks nobody has opened at six. Gloria gets there at five forty with her thermos and takes her place on the line. The line is a strip of flaked yellow paint on the asphalt, the spot where the trucks used to slow down for the barrier. Everyone calls it the line. This morning there are nine people on the line, then eleven, then fourteen. It's hot already.

Across the street there's a smell of caramel. The sugar refinery, even shut down, smells of caramel. It's the vapor left in the pipes, someone says. Gloria drinks the coffee from the thermos, which is cold, and looks at the gate. She is fifty-nine and has done twenty-two summers inside that gate. She's three years short of the pension with full health coverage. After all, the strike started over exactly that — over seniority and coverage, and over the overtime the company wanted to take away.

A kid in an orange vest brings the water. He hands one to Gloria. "Hot out," the kid says. "Hot out," Gloria says. On the water van there's a sticker of a beach with palm trees, who knows what other van it came off of. Nobody looks at it.

On the sidewalk, propped against the wall, are the strike signs. Local 6, they read. And they read sixth week. Someone brought a cake — after all it's the birthday of a woman from the night shift, the night shift that no longer exists. The cake is in a plastic box, powdered sugar on top, in the shade of the wall, and nobody cuts it because the birthday woman hasn't arrived yet. The box catches the sun at a slant. The powdered sugar, in the heat, is starting to glaze.

At seven ten the first car that doesn't slow down arrives. It's a gray sedan. It slows a little, then doesn't. The Contra Costa sheriff's deputies are lined up to one side, with batons. One is chewing a candy. The car moves toward the line and the line doesn't move. Gloria is third from the left. She sees the hood coming closer, sees behind the glass a man in sunglasses and, on the back seat, a child's car seat, empty, with a stuffed animal strapped inside. The car pushes. It doesn't sound the horn. It pushes slowly, the way you push a swollen door.

Gloria could take a step back. It's the reasonable thing. One step back and the car goes through and the line closes up again afterward, the line always closes up again. Plenty of people have done it, in six weeks. Gloria counts: nine, eleven, fourteen. Then she stops counting. She stays where she is. The bumper touches her knee, the fabric of her pants, the skin beneath. The metal is warm from the sun. Warm, not cold, and that doesn't add up, a car should be cool at this hour.

The man behind the glass says something with his mouth, and the voice doesn't reach her. The deputies move. One shouts that it's an unlawful assembly. The gas comes after, a white puff that spreads low over the asphalt, and above the gas the caramel smell remains, stronger, as if someone in the refinery had lit the furnaces, which isn't possible because the refinery has been idle for six weeks. Gloria coughs. The woman to her left takes her by the elbow. The line, seen from the ground where Gloria is now almost bent double, is not a yellow strip. It's a row of shoes. Work boots, sandals, an untied sneaker, feet that don't shift. The paint has nothing to do with it. The line is the shoes.

Nine people are handcuffed that morning. Then it becomes nine plus two who have sat down in the middle of the road. Gloria is not among the nine. A young deputy helps her back to her feet, almost gently, and she offers him the thermos, the cold coffee, she doesn't know why. "No, thanks," he says. "Hot out," Gloria says.

The gray sedan is now past the gate, stopped in the refinery's empty yard. The man has gotten out. He looks at the dead building. There's no one inside waiting for him, the shift hasn't existed for six weeks, there's no work beyond the gate he has just forced. He stands there with the keys in his hand. The empty car seat on the back seat catches the sun.

At nine the heat is full. The plastic cuffs on the wrists of the nine make a sound when they move, a small repeated click. Gloria is back on her feet on the yellow paint. They count again. Someone who arrived late asks how many they are. "Fourteen," Gloria says. Then another one arrives and they are fifteen. The number doesn't matter much, she knows: it's the shoes that count, and the shoes stay where they are. The yellow strip is flaked in a new spot, where the car scraped it going through.

In the afternoon, when the shift that doesn't exist would have ended, the caramel smell is still there. Gloria carries it home on her clothes, on the bus seat. It smells sweet, it smells of cooked sugar, the good smell of twenty-two summers. It doesn't square with anything that happened this morning, with the gas, with the handcuffs, with the warm metal against her knee. So why is it still there, the good smell, if nothing has cooked inside for six weeks and no one lights the furnaces?