I think, at some point. Not from him. Near him. I won't put a laugh on a man who didn't make it." He turned his head, slowly, and found Dylan with his eyes, and held him there without heat, the way you hold a level against a wall. "He never asked my name. That's the whole of it. Everything else is decoration. He served the store all afternoon exactly as the store has lately taught him to, and the one thing he skipped was the first thing. In my day we'd have called that a training fault, and we'd have known whose it was."
He did not get to say what came next, because the door opened.
Julie Anand came in the way she always came into the flagship β quickly, with purpose, a woman of forty-six who had run the Monroe Avenue store for six years, with a vendor folder in one hand and her keys already out in the other, already composing the first sentence of the rest of her afternoon. She got four steps into her own store and understood, from the quality of the stillness, that the rest of her afternoon had been cancelled and replaced with something else.
She saw Kessler first, standing in the middle of the floor with his inspection folder still under his arm like a man in a photograph of an interruption. She saw her floor staff standing in a rough arc, not working. She saw Dylan's face, and whatever she read there took the rest of the color out of her own. And she saw the stool, and the old man on it, last β the way everyone saw him last, which was, she would understand before she had crossed the room, the entire problem stated in a single fact of eyesight.
"Mr. Kessler," she said. "I β the vendor ran long, I got here as fast as β what β "
"Julie." Kessler's tone was not unkind. It was worse than unkind; it was careful. "Come here, please. There's someone you should meet, and then there's an afternoon you need to hear about, and the order of those two things matters."
She crossed the floor. Amos stood up from the stool to receive her, because a woman had come into the room and eighty years of West Michigan had not left him; he stood with a hand on the counter's edge for the first moment of it, then steady, and he put out his hand.
"Amos Hartley," he said. "You're Julie. I've read your name on many reports, mostly good ones. You've got a well-kept floor. It shows from the door."
"Mr. Hartley." Her voice came out thinner than she would have liked, and she cleared it and tried again. "Sir. I had no idea you were β no one told me β if I had known you were coming I would have β "
"I know you would have," Amos said. "That's rather the point of my afternoon, Julie. I came in the front, like anybody. I wanted to see the place as it is when it isn't expecting me." He said it without sting, which somehow made it harder to stand inside of. "And now you've had the report of it, or most of it. I'll not make you hear it twice. On your watch, and mine, a man came into the Hartley flagship this afternoon and was not asked his name. That's the size of it. Everything else is a list of who was standing where, and I'm too old to keep lists of that kind."
Julie looked at Dylan. She did not say anything to him. She looked at him the way a captain looks at a chart after the ship has already come off the rock, and then she looked at Elena, who had not moved from the end of the counter, and something passed between the two women that no one else in the room was equipped to read. Then she turned back to Amos, her folder held against her chest like a shield she had forgotten she was carrying.
"Sir, I want to say β on behalf of this store β "
"You can say it with paint," Amos said. "That's the apology I've come for, and it's the only one I intend to collect today." He turned, unhurried, toward the tinting counter, and the afternoon β which had been, for nearly an hour, an afternoon about who he was β became again, at his direction, an afternoon about a gallon of paint. "I asked at twenty past one, and I'll ask again: one gallon of Marlene Blue. Formula number zero-zero-one, from the Archive. Mixed here, on that machine, where I can watch it go in. I've mixed it ten thousand times, but today I'd like to watch. A man of eighty is entitled to watch his wife's color come up out of the tints one more time, I think, without having to argue for it."
"Of course," Kessler said. "Of course, Mr. Hartley. Dylan β "
"No," Amos said pleasantly. "Not Dylan."
The word fell into the room with the soft finality of a lid closing. Dylan did not move. It is possible he was grateful. It is possible he understood that he had been handed, by the man he had refused, the only mercy available to him that afternoon: not to be trusted with the thing that mattered.