The letters were hers from the mural years, when commissions took her away for weeks at a time — county libraries, school gymnasiums, one long summer on the wall of a hospital two counties over — written on motel stationery and on the backs of sketches, full of scaffold heights and other people's ladders and the price of eggs in towns he never saw. He had read them so often across fifty years that taking them out was hardly necessary, but the folder was under them, so he lifted the letters the way you lift a sleeping cat, carefully, without waking anything, and drew the Charter out.
It was not one document so much as pages that had agreed to live together. The first he had written the week he signed the lease in 1972, in ink, in the young hand again, all certainty and no scar tissue. The promises had joined it as life supplied them — a page here, a page there, some in pencil first and inked over when they'd proved themselves. At the renewal, eight years ago, the lawyers had wanted to retype the whole thing into one clean instrument with exhibits, and Amos had refused, in the only boardroom fight he ever picked on purpose. A clean copy was for the company's files, and the company was welcome to it. The original stayed what it was: the record of a man learning, in public, on paper, what his company was for. He unfolded it on his knees under the lamp, and the smell that came up off the old paper was not musty at all. It was turpentine and size and sweet feed dust, and it took him, the way smells do, without asking permission, straight back to the room where all of it started.
The store on Division Avenue had been a feed store for forty years before it was his, and it never entirely stopped being one. Sweet grain dust lived in the floorboards. The seed bins ran down one wall like a row of patient animals. The ceiling was tin, the light was bad, the floor sloped toward the back door with a mind of its own, and the rent was ninety dollars a month, which Amos Hartley, twenty-six years old and three years married, could just barely fail to afford. He had worked eight years mixing paint for a bigger firm across town — eight years of making other men's colors to other men's tolerances, eight years of learning precisely what he would not do — and in the spring of 1972 he signed the lease with a hand that shook only afterward, when Marlene was watching and it was safe.
He mixed at night because the days belonged to selling. By day he loaded the trunk of the Ford and drove Grand Rapids street by street — contractors, landlords, church janitors, the maintenance man at the high school, anybody whose buildings peeled — with sample boards tied down in the back and his order book on the seat beside him. By night he came back to Division Avenue, braced the secondhand drum mixer with his knee so it wouldn't walk across the sloping floor, and made paint until one, until two, until the cans stood in rows like a small patient army waiting for morning. The mixer threw a fine spray no matter what he did. He wore it home in his hair. Marlene, who taught art at the school on the hill and painted murals in the summers, took to bringing her sketchbook down to the store in the evenings, and she drew him at the mixer — a young man up to the elbows in white, scowling at a hydrometer — while pretending, for form's sake, to be reading.
The sign she painted the first weekend. Lettering was her first discipline, learned before oils, and she could lay a serif down like a mason laying brick. The board was pine, sanded twice. HARTLEY PAINT COMPANY, in letters of a deep, deliberate green — and beneath, in her smaller hand, the line she had fought him for over two suppers and won: Paint mixed here.
"Anybody can sell paint, Amos," she said, standing back with the brush still in her hand, judging the green. "Warehouses sell paint. We're going to make it where people can watch it being made. That's the whole company. The rest is arithmetic."
He had wanted the sign to say something about prices. He thought about that for years afterward — how close the whole enterprise had come to being founded on arithmetic — and every time he thought it he could hear her, not arguing, just waiting, brush in hand, for him to arrive where she already stood. The first midnight batch was a white for a landlord on the southeast side, forty gallons of it, and when the mixer finally stopped and the last can was lidded, Amos woke her from the cot in the back — she'd fallen asleep with her sketchbook over her face like a tent — and showed her a can of paint the way another man might show a photograph of a first child. She looked at it a long moment. "Well," she said. "He has your stubbornness. Let's hope he sells better than you do."