"One gallon," Amos said. "Eggshell. What is our cost on one gallon of eggshell, Robert? Not retail. Cost."
"Eleven dollars and change."
"Eleven dollars and change. A woman of seventy-one painted her dead husband's study, and the color went black on her in the north light, and the Hartley Paint Company, which I founded on without argument and without charge, sent her a determination. Manager approval withheld." He was very quiet. "Read the church."
"'Request SP-2301. Customer: Bethany Reformed Church, hall committee. Six gallons purchased for fellowship hall; color dried two shades darker than the approved sample board. Requested two gallons adjustment under the Promise. Denied. Grounds: batch variance within tolerance; hall lighting nonstandard.'" Kessler stopped. "The hall lighting. Amos, I wrote that phrase. As if a fellowship hall runs on some other kind of light than the light people eat potluck under."
"And the third."
"'Request SP-2387. Customer: a first-grade teacher, Lincoln Elementary. Bought one gallon for her classroom reading corner. Color wrong — her word was 'sad.' Requested replacement under the Promise. Denied: application error; she had not used the Hartley preparation checklist.'" He laid the page down carefully. "She bought the replacement herself. It's in the file because she wrote a letter. She said — " he found the line " — 'I am not writing about the paint. I am writing because my father bought paint from Mr. Hartley for forty years and said the word Hartley was a promise, and I wanted you to know that it isn't, anymore, in case nobody had told you.'"
"Nobody had told me," Amos said. "Nobody told me about the memo either. A memorandum that narrows a Charter promise is an amendment of the Charter, whatever letterhead it travels on, and amendments require my written consent during my lifetime. I gave no consent. I was never asked. I learned of the memo yesterday afternoon, from a twenty-two-year-old part-time associate — " he nodded toward Elena " — who assumed the founder of the company knew what the company was doing. It was the right assumption, Elena. It was the company that was wrong." He took his plain pen and dated the memo in the margin and initialed it, A.H., and set it at the left end of the slab. "Now the apprenticeship."
The apprenticeship pause was not even a memo. It was a single page from a human-resources planning summary, three years old, one line highlighted by Kessler in yellow: Apprenticeship intake suspended, to be revisited when labor markets normalize. No signature. Barely a sentence. The Hartley Apprenticeship — two paid places a year, running since 1973 — had been put down in a subordinate clause, by nobody in particular.
"And the applicants?" Amos asked.
"The web page was taken down, but the stores still got letters," Kessler said. "Two were sent up to the region because the managers felt bad, and forwarded to HR. There is no reply on file. No record of one being sent."
He laid the two letters on the slab. One was typed, from a young woman in Holland, Michigan, seventeen, who worked weekends in her uncle's hardware store and had enclosed photographs of a mural she had painted on its back wall — the lake in four seasons — and who wrote that she could tell two whites apart at twenty feet and wanted to learn whether that could be taught. The second was written in pencil, on lined paper torn from a spiral notebook, and Amos looked at it a long moment before handing it to Elena.
"Read it aloud," he said. "The whole road, Elena. Names and all. Like a formula card."
Elena read: "'Dear Hartley Paint Company. My name is Darnell Price. I am sixteen. I live on Fuller Avenue, two streets from Store Number One. My grandmother says your first store is the reason our street got paved, I don't know if that is true. I am writing about the apprenticeship. I mix colors for my uncle's jobs in the summer, not paint, colors — I mean I can look at a wall and say what is in it. My art teacher, Mrs. Osei, says I have color eyes. I do not know if that is a real thing. I would work for free but my mother says the Hartley apprenticeship is paid and that Mr. Hartley made it paid on purpose so that boys who cannot afford to work for free can still learn. I am one of those boys. I will come any day you say. Darnell Price.'" She stopped. "He never got an answer," she said. "Sixteen years old, two streets from Store Number One, and nobody even wrote back no."
"Color eyes," said a voice from the stairs.
They all turned. Iris Bellamy stood on the third step from the bottom, holding a leather document case against her chest, seventy-four years old, her white hair cut short as a man's, a smear of something cobalt at the cuff of her coat — she had never in her life been near paint and come away clean. She had mixed beside Amos from 1974. There was no color in the eleven boxes she had not either made, supervised, or argued about.