The afternoon came on with its appointments and its small ceremonies. A young couple, first house, terrified of the color of a nursery, whom Elena settled with a stool and a glass of water and the suggestion that they take the sample cards home and live with them through one whole evening before deciding, because paint changed its mind at dusk and so were they allowed to. The stool was her own contribution to the Studio's furniture: a scarred wooden thing she kept by the sample wall for the overwhelmed, the pregnant, the elderly, and the men pretending not to be any of those things. It was not on-message. It remained, because Julie, who ran the store in the space between the doctrine and the door, had once looked at the stool, and at Elena, and said, "Leave it," in the voice of a woman choosing her one battle a day.
Julie would be back by three, if the vendor meeting gave her back at all. And at two o'clock — it was on the day sheet in Julie's hand, underlined twice — Robert Kessler, the regional manager, was due for the scheduled inspection visit. Everyone in the building knew Kessler's name the way you know the name of weather coming. He had started at Hartley in 1990, as a stock boy at Store No. 3 out on Division, and the old people said Amos Hartley had trained him personally — had made him memorize the archive cards like catechism, a card a day, the formula and the story both. Kessler at fifty-seven was courteous, thorough, and entirely unreadable. The Studio would be at its polished best for him at two.
At half past one she took the returns bin down to the basement, because the bin was full and because the basement, whatever else it was, was the one room in the building that did not want anything from her.
The basement was the old store's heart, unrenovated — the redesign had stopped at the top of the stairs like a tide at a seawall. Down here were the tinting machines' ancestors, retired in rows under dust sheets, and the smell the Studio had been designed to forget: turpentine and cardboard and cold concrete, the smell of work. Elena set the returns on the shelving by the basement door, in the place she'd made for them, and it was while she was straightening the shelf that she saw the boxes.
They had not been there Monday. They were along the back wall, past the dust-sheeted machines: banker's boxes, taped and labeled in a hand she recognized as Julie's. COLOR ARCHIVE — CARDS 1972–1989. COLOR ARCHIVE — CUSTOM FORMULAS, A–D. COLOR ARCHIVE — M–R. Her heart did the thing it had done in bay four, the turning of the school of fish, except this time it turned in her chest.
On the top box, under the tape, a facilities notice, printed, impersonal, already curling: TO BE COLLECTED FRIDAY — DIGITIZATION REVIEW. DISPOSAL PER FACILITIES PROTOCOL PENDING REVIEW OUTCOME.
Elena stood in the cold light with her hand flat on the top box, on the tape, on the words.
She knew what the Color Archive was. Every child of the trade in Grand Rapids knew it. Since 1972 — since Amos Hartley had opened the first store with a borrowed tinting machine and a conviction that a formula was a promise — every custom color the company had ever mixed had been written down by hand: the pigments, the ounces and the drops, the base, the year, and — because Amos had insisted — the name of the person it was mixed for, and what it was for. The mural in the library. The nursery on Garfield Avenue. The exact green of a grandmother's kitchen in 1983, recreated in 2009 for a granddaughter who had brought in a drawer front wrapped in a dish towel. Fifty years of the city's rooms, on cards, in flat files that had stood behind the old counter like an altar's cupboards. The Founders' Charter of 1972 promised three things. The Second Coat Promise: if a color isn't right, the second gallon is free. The Hartley Apprenticeship. And the third, the strange one, the one that made new managers smile politely: the Color Archive kept intact, forever.
Digitization review. The digital library is complete and authoritative, Heather had said, not three hours ago, smiling from the other side of a screen. The paper is redundancy with a storage cost.
Elena knew about the digital library. She had helped a woman in July — a drawer front wrapped in a dish towel; it was a genre of grief this address specialized in — and searched the authoritative digital library for a green from 1983, and the library had given her back a color called Heritage Sage, which was not the green, which was a photograph of the idea of the green. The card would have had the drops. The card would have had the name. The cards were in these boxes, and the boxes had a date on them, and the date was Friday.