Marlene Blue

Dylan's smile acquired patience, the way a lake acquires ice, from the edges. "Sir, the archive isn't a retail service. The archived formulas are — they're historical documents, basically. Corporate heritage stuff. We don't mix from the archive at store level. I'm not even sure the system would take the codes. Our tinting is all digital now, it's all in the computer, and the computer has the current line."

"The formula is on a card," Amos said. "The card gives the weights. A machine does not need to know a color's name to weigh its tint."

"Right. In theory." Dylan glanced — Amos marked it, the first glance — toward the back of the room, where the stockroom door stood flush with the paneling, and then toward the front windows, as if hoping the room might supply him with a better class of interruption. "The thing is, we're a studio now. The whole format changed. We do color consultation, design direction, full-room palettes. We sell rooms, not paint — that's actually our line, that's from our VP. The mixing we do is for clients with projects in the system. Walk-in trade mixing, one-off gallons of discontinued colors — that's really more of a — " He paused, and found the phrase he wanted, and was pleased with it. " — that's more of a big-box service. Honestly, sir, if it's a repair job, a touch-up on a work site, you might do better at the store out on Twenty-Eighth Street. They do house-painter colors, they have the big tinting machines, and I think — " and here the second consultant, a young man restocking the framed families on the river wall, looked up, and Dylan's voice took on the small lift of a man who has found his audience " — I think they have a sale on. Contractor days or something. Buckets."

The young man at the river wall laughed, briefly, the way one laughs at a joke made by a senior in a room where the senior is watching.

Amos did not laugh, but he did not frown either. He had been laughed at by experts in his time. He had learned that laughter at a counter was a kind of weather: it told you about the climate of the place, and nothing at all about the value of your errand. He noted the climate. That was all.

"What I am repairing," he said, "is a mural. The color has to match. A near color will show like a scar. That is why it has a formula."

"Sir — " Dylan began, and at that moment the stockroom door opened and a girl came through it with a clipboard against her chest and a smear of honest white on one wrist, and she saw Amos, and she saw the can, and her face did something entirely different from what the room had trained it to do. It lit.

"Mr. — " she said, and stopped. She was twenty-two, perhaps, with her hair pinned up by a pencil and a name tag that said Elena, Associate. "That can. That's the old label. That's pre-eighty-five, the hand-lettered — " She came around the end of the island before Dylan could arrange his face. "Is that Marlene Blue? The label's gone but the can — the lid. That's the color. I've only seen it in the archive book."

"It is the color," Amos said. "What is left of it."

Elena looked at the can with the uncomplicated reverence of a person looking at a first edition. "I did a paper on the early Hartley colors for my design history class. Formula zero-zero-one. The founder mixed it for his wife, for a painting she was doing of the river, and she told him it was wrong three times before — "

"Elena." Dylan's voice was pleasant and final. "We're in the middle of a consultation."

"You could just check the archive," Elena said. She said it to Dylan, not defiantly, but with the air of a person pointing out that a door is, in fact, a door. "It's all boxed in the basement still. The card file is on top — I saw it when I took the returns down. It would take ten minutes to pull the card and I can weigh the tints by hand if the machine won't — "

"We don't fetch antiques, Elena." Dylan smiled at Amos as he said it, including him in the joke, making him a party to it. "The system is the system. If it isn't in the system, it isn't in the store. That's not me being difficult, that's the format. You know that." He turned the smile back to its full wattage for Amos. "Elena's our romantic. Design student. She'd run this place like a museum if we let her."

"I study color," Elena said quietly. "It's a paint company."

There was a small silence, in which the music from nowhere completed a phrase and began another, and Amos looked at the girl and thought that the place had one employee, at least, who had read the building's own stone. He did not say so. He had come as a customer, and a customer does not hand out commendations at the counter; he had set himself that rule in the library parking lot, and he kept to it the way he kept to crosswalks.