Dylan, perhaps feeling that the interview had drifted from its rails, recovered it in the manner of his training, which was to say by widening the welcome to include Amos's departure. "Tell you what," he said. "Let me give you the honest lay of the land. If you're trade — and no disrespect, sir, the clothes say you've been on a job today, I respect that — if you're trade, there's the contractor desk out at the Burton Street warehouse, they still do will-call. This location, we don't even have a trade entrance anymore. They took it out in the redesign. The door's still there but it opens into the consultation suite now." He said this with a small shake of the head, the practiced regret of a man describing a flood that had damaged someone else's house. "That's how much the format's changed. I couldn't ring up a gallon of an archive color if I wanted to. There's no button for it. There is literally no button."
"Then let me ask about the button you have," Amos said. "Your machine doses by weight or by volume?"
Dylan blinked. "It — the machine does it. You pick the color on the screen and it does it."
"The old formula is written in ounces and one-hundred-twenty-eighths, by weight, against a neutral eggshell base that took a full colorant load. Marlene Blue is a heavy color. Eleven ounces to the gallon, and two of the tints are oxides. If your colorants are the new universal line, the green will go gray at that depth and the color will bronze on the wall under library light. So I am asking whether the machine still takes a hand-entered weight, and whether your eggshell base is still the old neutral base or the new pre-tinted one. Because if it is the pre-tinted one, I will need the quantities adjusted, and I can do the arithmetic here at the counter, if someone will tell me the base."
The music played. Somewhere behind the paneling a stockroom printer woke and thought better of it. Dylan looked at Amos with an expression that Amos had last seen on the face of a bank examiner in 1989 who had opened a drawer he had not expected to be asked about.
"The machine," Dylan said, brightly, arriving at brightness the way a man arrives at a life raft, "is state of the art. It's a twelve-canister automatic dispenser, it self-calibrates, it's networked to the whole company. It can match anything. You could bring in a — a sock, and it would match the sock." He turned half toward the river wall, where the consultation table stood in its pool of arranged calm. "What we could do — what I'd honestly recommend — is book you a color consultation. First one's complimentary. We sit down, we look at where this color is going, we find you its modern equivalent in the current line, something with the same soul but with pigments that actually exist, and honestly, sir, you'd probably like it better. The old colors could be — " he searched, and found a word, and used it gently, as one uses a word on a child " — muddy. The new line is just cleaner. Color science has come a long way since nineteen seventy-eight."
"Nineteen seventy-eight thanks you for your concern," Amos said.
He said it without heat. He might have been discussing the weather in a county he did not live in. But he felt the old familiar sorrow settle on him, the specific sorrow of this errand, which was not that a young man was being rude — rudeness was a small coin, and he had been paid in it before — but that the young man was being rude in Marlene's house, with her color on his own cheek like a thumbprint, and did not know whose house it was, and would not have cared to be told. He had painted that color on a kitchen wall the year it was made and she had stood in the doorway with her arms folded and said, "There. That's the river at the hour it stops pretending." The color had gone into nurseries and libraries and the inside of a lighthouse keeper's cottage up at Grand Haven. It had a card. The card had a number. The number was one.
At that moment the front door sighed open and admitted a couple in their forties, the woman carrying a swatch book from a kitchen designer and the man carrying the expression of a person paying for decisions already made, and Dylan's whole body reoriented like a sunflower. "Mr. and Mrs. Calloway — you're early, wonderful, let me get you settled." He was out from behind the island and across the floor with a speed that had not been available for archive cards. "We'll take the