Robert Kessler had been due at the flagship at two o'clock, and he was a man who arrived when he was due, because Amos Hartley had trained him that way thirty-six years ago in a store that no longer existed, in an aisle of Store No. 3 where the light came through a wired-glass window. A customer's time, the old man had said, is the only money they can't earn back. So Kessler came through the Monroe Avenue door at two o'clock exactly, with his inspection folder under his arm, and he stopped.
He did not stop because of anything wrong. That was the terrible thing, later, when he turned it over — the room looked, at first glance, entirely right. The Color Studio was doing what the Color Studio was built to do. Light fell through the tall front windows onto the long consultation tables. The color wall rose at the back in its graded thousands, a whole weather system of paint. A woman in a camel coat stood at the second table with a consultant, holding two swatch cards to the light. Behind the counter, a shaker was running, that patient mechanical heartbeat the company had been founded inside of.
And on a stool by the tinting counter, where customers did not ordinarily sit because customers were not ordinarily given stools, sat an old man in paint-stained work clothes, his hands empty on his knees — Kessler noticed the empty hands before he noticed anything else — his boots clean in the way of a man who had wiped them at a door, and Marlene's blue on the cuff of his shirt, that blue. Kessler knew him before his mind had finished arriving at the knowing. He knew him by the set of the shoulders. He knew him by the patience.
He had known Amos Hartley since he was twenty-one years old and lying about how much he could lift.
Kessler crossed the floor. He did not go to the office, or the consultation table, or any of the dozen places a regional manager arriving for an inspection is expected to go and be received. He crossed the long polished floor in a straight line, and the folder under his arm was forgotten so completely that he would find it there an hour later and have no memory of carrying it at all. He stopped in front of the stool, at the distance Amos had taught him — close enough to talk, far enough to leave a man his dignity — and he put out his hand the way he had put it out ten thousand times across thirty-six years, in stockrooms, at openings, at one graveside, and he said the two words the whole afternoon had been failing to say.
"Mr. Hartley."
Amos looked up. His eyes were the eyes of a man who has been sitting somewhere a long time being nobody, and who is not going to make a performance now of being somebody. He took the hand. His grip was a working grip still, paint worked deep into the lines of the palm, and Kessler felt the whole of his own career go through that handshake like a current finding its ground.
"Robert," Amos said. "You're punctual. I taught you that and you've kept it better than the rest of them. You've got your inspection." He said it mildly, as if Kessler had happened upon him in a park. "Don't let me keep you from it."
It was the mildness that did it. Kessler had come through the door a regional manager with a folder and a schedule, and he stood now in the middle of his flagship holding the hand of an eighty-year-old man who had been given a stool and nothing else — a man does not sit like that in his own store unless he has asked for something and been refused it — and the mildness of him, the refusal to make a scene of what had plainly been done to him, landed on Kessler like a hand on the back of his neck.
He turned. He was still holding Amos's hand; he let it go, carefully, the way you set down something that is holding you up. He turned so that the room could hear him, and he raised his voice — not loud. Kessler had never in his life needed to be loud. He had learned that from the man on the stool too.
"I want everyone's attention," he said. "It won't take long, and it needs to be heard by the whole floor."
The shaker behind the counter wound down into silence, as if it too had been told. The woman in the camel coat lowered her swatch cards. The consultants at the tables straightened in the way of people who understand, before they understand anything else, that the weather in a room has changed.
"This is Amos Hartley," Kessler said.
He let the name stand there in the air of the Studio, in front of the color wall, over the long tables.