Dylan, at the color wall with his cloth, saw him too. Elena watched the triage happen β shoes, hands, clothes, deck β and arrive at its verdict. She saw Dylan glance at the clock, at the near horizon of two o'clock, and begin, almost imperceptibly, to angle himself away from the door β toward a task that would have his back turned when it opened. A man in paint-stained work clothes, eleven minutes before the regional inspection, was not a client. He was a complication. In the private arithmetic of the Order of the Real he was below zero: a subtraction. And subtractions, in the model store, were Elena's department β the returns bin, the stool, the basement stairs.
The old man reached the glass door and paused there, looking in β at the wall, at the light, at the room his company had become β with an expression Elena would spend a long time afterward trying to name: recognition, and sorrow, and something almost, not quite, amusement, like a man reading a letter written about him by people who had never met him.
Then Amos Hartley put his hand on the door of his own flagship store, and came in out of the October light with the unhurried walk of a man who had never once, in fifty-three years, been refused entry anywhere he owned.
The walk from the Eastown branch library to Monroe Avenue took eleven minutes, and Amos Hartley took fifteen, because a man of eighty carrying a paint can does not hurry, and because he had no wish to arrive anywhere out of breath. He had been on his feet since nine that morning, up on the library's rolling scaffold with a brush in his hand, and his knees had opinions about it, but his shirt was buttoned to the throat and his cap was straight, and the can swung from his right hand as regular as a metronome.
The can was the last of it. That was the plain fact he had carried out of the library along with the can itself. Forty years Marlene's river had run along the library's east wall, through two renovations and one flood and a generation of children who had grown up reading under it, and this spring the plaster people had found damp behind the north end and cut her sky away in sheets to get at it. The library had called him β not the company, him, the way you call a person and not an institution β and Amos had gone, three mornings a week for a month, with his old brushes in a coffee tin and his formula in his head, and he had rebuilt the sky panel by panel out of what remained in the can. This morning he had tipped the can over his brush and heard the sound a can makes when there is one good coat left in it and then a rumor.
One gallon. That was all the errand was. One gallon of Marlene Blue, mixed from the archived formula, and he could finish the last stretch of sky above the children's reading chairs and sign her name again in the corner where the damp had taken it, the way he had signed it for her in 1985 when her own hand was already beginning to tremble and she had stood below the scaffold saying, "Lower, Amos. Your M leans like it's tired."
He crossed Monroe in the crosswalk, correctly, because Marlene had held firm views about jaywalking and forty years of marriage had made her views load-bearing. The flagship stood where it had always stood, in the building he had bought in 1979 when the street was warehouses and the realtor had thought him mad. Hartley Color Works, the stone still said, up high, where the redesign had not reached. Below the stone, everything had reached. The windows that had once shown paint β honest cans in honest rows, a ladder, a drop cloth, a hand-lettered card in the spring saying WE MATCH ANY COLOR EVER MADE β now showed rooms. A sofa. A lamp with a shade like a hat. A wall the color of wet sand, and on the wall, in letters of brushed brass, the words COLOR STUDIO, and beneath them, smaller, a sentence Amos read twice: Begin with the room you'll love.
He stood a moment on the sidewalk with his can and let a young woman with a stroller go past him into the door, which opened for her by itself, silently, the way doors in hospitals did. Then he went in.
The smell reached him first, or rather the absence of it did. A paint store for fifty years of his life had smelled of linseed and turpentine and the faint sweet dust of pigment, a smell that got into a man's cuffs and stayed there like a signature. This room smelled of nothing at all, or of the idea of nothing β cedar, perhaps, from a diffuser shaped like a stone. Music played from nowhere at the volume of a held breath. The floor was