"I think," he said, to the room at large, in the mildest voice he owned, "that I will wait a while, if nobody minds. I have time. There's a man coming at two who might know about buttons."
"Of course, sir," Dylan said from the consultation table, with the warmth of a man granting a favor that costs him nothing. "Take all the time you need. We're here till six." And he turned back to the Calloways and the future, and the consultation resumed its murmur, and the music from nowhere resumed its held breath, and Amos stood at the end of the black island with his cap in its precise place and his can at his feet, a piece of the room's older furniture that the redesign had overlooked.
He thought about the mural while he waited. He thought about the last stretch of sky above the reading chairs, where the damp had eaten the river's evening and left a pale scar of new plaster, and about how the color would go on over it, coat over coat, and the river would be whole again by Friday if the world behaved — Friday, the day of the tag in the basement. Everything in this errand, he reflected, was scheduled for Friday: the finishing of Marlene's sky and the shredding of Marlene's card, the one racing the other like two horses from the same stable, and only one of them knew there was a race. He thought about telling Dylan the date was a coincidence worth remarking. He decided the young man had had enough education for one afternoon and would get the rest of it shortly, free of charge, from events.
At twenty minutes to two, Elena crossed the room with a returns cart, and on her way past the tower of farmhouse books she did a small thing. She took one of the old trade stools by its rung — the turned wood, the ring worn in its side where two generations of painters' boots had rested — and she carried it, without ceremony and without asking anyone, and set it down at the end of the island, at Amos's elbow, and went on with the cart as if she had merely corrected a piece of furniture that was out of place.
Amos looked at the stool. He looked at the girl's back, already busy, already pretending. His knees said what they had been saying for an hour, more formally now. He sat down.
"Thank you," he said, to no one in particular, in a store that had not thanked him for anything.
"Don't mention it," Elena said, not looking up, in the voice of a person denying everything.
So he sat, at last, in his own store, on his own stool, in his stained clothes with Marlene Blue on his cheek, the near-empty can on the floor beside his boot like a piece of evidence that had not yet been called. The clock without numbers crept toward the hour that numbers would have made plain. Dylan, freed of his consultation at last — the Calloways departed with a folder, a coffee afterglow, and an appointment for Thursday — moved about the room doing the final polish of it, squaring the sample fan, aligning the framed families on the river wall by millimeters, rehearsing, though he would not have called it that, for the inspection he believed would crown his afternoon. He did not look at the old man on the stool. The old man had been filed, in Dylan's mind, under the afternoon's minor weather: a browser, a relic, a man waiting out some confusion of his own, who would be gone by two and forgotten by two-oh-five.
At three minutes to two, the front door sighed open.
The man who came through it wore a blazer with the Hartley name worked into the breast in thread the color of deep water, and he carried a tablet in one hand and a regional manager's whole itinerary in his bearing, and he got exactly two steps into the room — two steps past the threshold — and stopped dead, as a man stops at the edge of a scaffold plank that isn't there. His eyes had found the end of the island. His face went through its journey in reverse, all in one second: from inspection to recognition to something very close to prayer.
"Mr. — " Robert Kessler said. And then he said nothing at all, because the old man on the stool had raised one finger, gently, the way a conductor asks for quiet, and had gone on looking at the river wall, where a color that was not there hung in a frame that should have held it.