By the second year they were selling. Not prospering — selling, which is prospering's younger and tireder brother. And in the spring of 1973 a young couple came in with a color chip and a piece of news. He was a finisher at one of the furniture factories, nineteen years at a bench still ahead of him and no idea of it yet; she was expecting in June and had the bright, breakable certainty of a woman who has already furnished a room in her mind down to the curtains. They had bought their first house, a small one, four rooms and a porch. For the nursery she wanted a yellow — not school-bus, not gold, a soft lemon light of a yellow — and they chose it off the chip together, standing at Amos's counter with their heads together like conspirators. He mixed two gallons himself. He was proud of the match. He told them so.
A week later they came back carrying a painted board, and they were not angry. Angry would have been easier. They were stricken, the way people are when a small hope has been handled carelessly and they suspect it is somehow their fault. The yellow had dried wrong. On the wall, in the room's real light, it had gone down dark and green at the heart of it, the color of pea soup, the color of the inside of a pond — and the baby was due in five weeks, and the money was spent, every cent of it, on paint and a crib and the hundred small tolls a first house exacts.
Amos drove out to see the room. He always went; that was the rule before there were rules. The crib stood assembled in the corner, white as a promise. The walls were pond-green. And he knew, standing there with his hat in his hands, exactly whose fault it was: a pigment lot had shifted, the base had taken the color somewhere the chip had never promised to go, and the man who had mixed it and been proud of it was him. The store owed its rent on Friday. Replacing two gallons free — mixing the correction, testing it against the northern light of that room, doing it right — would cost him money he had already spent twice in his head on other debts. He could afford it the way a man can afford to jump a fence: once, and with consequences.
He mixed it that night and took it over on Sunday and stayed to help roll the first wall, the three of them working in the smell of new paint while the radio played low, and by evening the room was the color of lemon light and the young father stood in the doorway holding the roller tray like an offering and said, "That's it. That's the room she described."
Marlene heard the whole account at their own table that night, saying nothing, which with Marlene was the sound of a decision being loaded. On Sunday, after the store closed, she came down to Division Avenue with her lettering brushes in their roll and painted on the wall behind the counter, in her best hand, in letters a foot high, where no customer could miss it and no Hartley could ever take it back:
IF THE COLOR ISN'T RIGHT WHEN IT DRIES, THE SECOND GALLON IS FREE.
"If we're going to do it," she said, "we do it in paint, on the wall. Promises in pencil are just intentions with good posture."
The other paint men on the avenue said it would bankrupt him inside a year. Contractors laughed about it in the coffee shop — kindly, which was worse. Amos let them laugh. What he had understood in that green little room, with the white crib standing in it, was that he was not selling paint at all and never had been. He was selling the moment a person stands in a doorway and sees the room they meant. A gallon at a time, the promise cost him. What it bought was Grand Rapids, one front room at a time, for fifty years.
The cards began with that same nursery. Two months later the couple came back — the baby born, a daughter, furious and thriving — wanting the lemon yellow matched again for a dresser, and Amos had stood at his own counter trying to match his own memory and had hated the feeling the way a man hates a debt. Never again. From that week, every custom color the store mixed got a card: the customer's name, the date, the formula to the gram — and at Marlene's insistence, one more line, in her hand where she could manage it. The room. "People don't come back for a color, Amos," she said. "They come back for a room they want to live in twice. Write down the room."