pale wood in wide boards, and the color wall — he found it, because some instinct in him still navigated by it — stood along the back, but it was not the wall he remembered. It was a gallery. Colors hung in framed families, each with a name in a serif typeface and a small paragraph about its feelings. River colors had a section to themselves, deep and green and glossy as a magazine page, and Amos walked the length of it slowly, with his can, looking for a blue he had made in his own kitchen in 1978 out of ultramarine and black and a green he had argued about with the pigment man for a week.
It was not there. He had known it would not be there — Elena from the trade desk, before the trade desk was abolished, had written him a kind note two years ago when the letter had come down — but he looked anyway, the way a man checks a drawer he has already emptied, because the looking was a form of respect. Where Marlene Blue should have stood, between the deep teals and the true blues, there was a color called Harbor Light and one called Regatta and one called Weekend, and the little paragraphs beneath them were all very pleased with themselves.
The trade counter was gone. In its place, where four generations of painters had leaned their elbows and argued about sheen, there stood a consultation table of white stone, with four chairs upholstered in bouclé and a bowl of wooden spheres arranged on a tray, for reasons the redesign presumably understood. Behind the counter that remained — a long, low island of matte black, like the desk of a hotel that would prefer you not to ask for anything — a young man was arranging sample boards in a fan, with the absorbed precision of a card dealer. He looked up as Amos approached, and Amos watched the look happen, the whole of it, in the half second it took: the cap, the stained shirt, the trousers with their palimpsest of forty years, the cheek — Amos knew about the cheek; there was primer on it, and below the primer a freckling of deep blue-green that soap at the library sink had declined to remove — and the can. The can, with its paper label worn to a shine and its lid stippled with the color itself.
The young man's face completed its journey and arrived at a smile. It was a good smile, professionally. It had been trained.
"Afternoon," the young man said. "Looking for something in particular, or just browsing the colors?"
"Something in particular," Amos said. "I need a gallon mixed. An archived color. Marlene Blue. Formula number zero-zero-one, in the eggshell base."
He said it the way he had said it at counters for fifty years, which was to say precisely, with the information in the order a mixer needed it: color, formula, quantity, base, finish. He set the can down on the black island — gently; he had seen in time not to set a can down on a surface that had feelings — and the young man looked at the can and then at the fan of sample boards and then, with great courtesy, back at Amos, and the smile did not move, but something behind it began, very quietly, to close a door.
"Marlene Blue," the young man repeated, in the tone of a man tasting a word in a language he does not speak. His name, on a brushed-steel tag that matched the letters on the window, was Dylan. Senior Color Consultant, the tag said, in smaller letters, as if the seniority were a confidence. "I'm not familiar with that one. Is it one of ours?"
"It is the first one of yours," Amos said. "Nineteen seventy-eight. It was on the wall until the redesign."
"Oh — a legacy color." Dylan said legacy the way one says a deceased relative's hobby. "Yeah, the wall was completely re-curated two years ago. The whole line was re-thought. We kept maybe a third of the old names. The rest were — " he made a small, regretful motion with the sample fan, like a man fanning smoke away from his face " — retired. Honestly, some of those old formulas were from another era. Pigments you can't even source anymore. The new river palette covers a lot of the same ground. Harbor Light is gorgeous in a north-facing room. Very close family to what you're describing."
"I am not describing a family," Amos said. "I am describing a color. It has a formula card. Number zero-zero-one, in the Color Archive. I need a gallon of it in the eggshell base, for a repair."