consultation table. Can I get you a coffee — we have the machine now, it's Italian — Elena, coffees, the Calloways." The woman glanced at Amos in passing, at the stained trousers and the can and the cheek, with the neutral, incurious glance of a person stepping around a ladder on a sidewalk, and Amos stepped aside to let them pass, because his mother had raised him to give way in doorways, and stood with his empty hands folded while the Calloways were seated in the bouclé chairs and supplied with coffee and a bowl of wooden spheres to contemplate, and the consultation began at a murmur, warm as a hearth.
No one had offered Amos a chair. There were two stools at the end of the island, backless, of turned wood — he recognized them, with a small interior start, as the old trade-counter stools, retained by some decorator as rustic accents. They were three feet from his hand. He did not take one. A customer who has not been offered a seat in a store that sells rooms does not seat himself like a man in his own kitchen; there are forms, and Amos, who disagreed with the forms, nevertheless observed them, out of the same instinct that made him use the crosswalk. He set his hat — he had taken his cap off at the door, out of an older etiquette still — he set his cap on the island, precisely, beside the can, and waited to be finished being waited on.
Elena brought the coffees to the consultation table, and on her way back, by a route that was not the shortest one, she passed close by the end of the island and spoke without looking at him, in the tone of a person commenting on the weather to a window.
"The archive's still all there," she said. "Eleven boxes. I counted them when I took the returns down last week. The card file sits right on top of the first one, in a green tin box. But there's a tag on the shelving now. Friday. It says hold for shredding, Friday, per corporate." She straightened a stack of sample chips that did not need straightening. "And Mr. Kessler's doing his inspection at two. Regional. He always goes through the basement. Julie — Mrs. Anand, the manager — she's at a vendor meeting till mid-afternoon, so it's just us and him at two."
"Elena," Dylan called, pleasantly, from the consultation table. "When you have a moment, the Calloways would love to see the full river palette. The big board."
"Yes, Dylan." She went. But first, in the half second of turning, she looked at Amos, and the look said a whole sentence in the language of junior employees everywhere: I would if I could, and I am sorry that the world is arranged so that I can't — and Amos, whose whole life had been arranged by people saying I would if I could, inclined his head to her, gravely, the way one acknowledges a colleague.
He considered his position. It was twenty minutes past one by the brushed-brass clock that the redesign had chosen for the wall, a clock with no numbers, which Amos regarded as a confession. He could leave — Dylan would hold the door of his bright indifference wide for him — and drive out to Burton Street, where men he had hired were now old and would know his face and fall over themselves, and where he would have his gallon in twenty minutes and a cup of coffee he'd be made to accept. He could go home and weigh the tints from his own stock, except that the green oxide had gone to a grandson's science project in 2019 and the ultramarine he kept was the modern, weaker grind, and Marlene's sky deserved the true weights. He could telephone. There were, conservatively, four hundred people in Michigan who would take a telephone call from Amos Hartley and set a building on fire if he asked them politely. Any of these roads led to a gallon of paint. None of them led to the thing he had actually come for, which he now understood — with the can at his feet and the clock lying to him in brass — had never been only the gallon.
He had come to find out whether his store was still his store. Not the building: the deed was a piece of paper in a vault and no one disputed it. The other thing. The thing Marlene had meant when she named a color after a river and a company after nothing but their own name. A place that would sell a gallon of paint to a man in stained trousers without first deciding what he was for. He had been waiting two years to learn it — since the kind note about the redesign, since the trade counter came out, since the letter he had not answered because answering it as chairman would have spoiled the experiment before it ran. He could wait forty more minutes on his feet, which had held up scaffolds.