Amos turned his head along the counter until he found the person he was looking for, and his face changed — not into warmth, exactly, because it had never been cold, but into attention, which on him was a form of warmth with better manners.
"Young lady," he said. "The one with the stool."
Elena stepped forward. Her hands were still clasped; she unclasped them, deliberately, and let them hang at her sides, where they shook slightly, and then stopped.
"What's your name?" Amos asked.
"Elena," she said. "Elena Vasquez."
"Elena Vasquez," he repeated, the way a man enters a name in a ledger he intends to keep. "You've been with us how long?"
"Seven months, sir."
"Seven months, and you're the one who brought the stool." He nodded once, at the fact, as if ticking a box on a form only he could see. "Then you'll be the one who fetches my formula, Elena, if you would. Downstairs, in the Archive. Card number one, Marlene Blue, 1978. It should be at the front of the first box — it was always kept at the front, because it was the first. Bring it up carefully. Two hands. The old cards are typed on stock that wasn't made to last fifty years, and some of them — " the ghost of something crossed his face, there and gone — "some of them are written on, which makes them worth more, not less."
Elena glanced — she couldn't help it — at Dylan, and then at Julie, because orders ran downhill from those two, and she had already broken one order that day with a stool. Julie gave her a single nod, quick and absolute.
"Elena," Amos said, before she could go, and she stopped. "When you bring it up, bring it to me first. Not to the counter. To me."
"Yes, sir," she said. "Two hands."
She went through the staff door at the back, and the door swung, and swung, and settled.
She was gone four minutes. They were long minutes. Nobody on the floor pretended to work. The woman in the camel coat, who had every right to leave, did not leave; she stood with her two indistinguishable whites forgotten in her hand and watched the staff door, because the afternoon now ran through that door. Julie set her vendor folder down on a consultation table, as if putting down a weapon she no longer intended to use. Amos sat down again on the stool — lowered himself the way old men do, in stages disguised as a single motion — and folded his hands, and waited with the terrible patience of a man who had been waiting since twenty past one.
The staff door swung.
Elena came up out of the basement with the card in both hands, held flat and level at waist height like a tray, like an offering plate — and she walked the length of the Studio floor without hurrying, and stopped in front of Amos, and held it out.
"Formula number one," she said. "It was at the front of the first box. Like you said."
Amos took it in both hands.
The card was heavy stock, cream gone the color of weak tea, typed along the top in the stubborn strike of a manual typewriter: HARTLEY PAINT COMPANY — COLOR ARCHIVE — FORMULA No. 001. Below, the formula itself, tint by tint, in columns worn pale with age. And across the top of the card, above the type, in blue ink — in a young man's handwriting, upright and careful — was written a name and a date.
MARLENE BLUE. 1978. For M.
"Fifty-four years I've run this company," Amos said, to no one, or to the card, "and I believe this is the steadiest my hands have ever not been." He looked at the writing for a long time. "I wrote that in February of 1978. We'd been married nine years by then. She came in out of the snow one night with a grievance against every blue in the catalog — that's the truth of it — she'd been trying for a month to mix the Grand River after dark, and every blue I sold was, in her words, either sea or sky. Took me nine nights. The failures stood in a row of labeled jars, and she wouldn't let me throw a one of them away. On the ninth night she held the card up to the window, snow coming down through the streetlight, and said, 'That's it. That's the river at night.' When I wrote the card, I wrote her name on it before I wrote anything else. The