William Santoro closed the door behind him. He had a folder too, thicker than Heather's, tabbed and flagged, and he took the foot of the table and stood a moment with his hands on the back of his chair before he sat, because a rehearsed thing wants its posture.
"Before anything else," Santoro said, "I want to thank everyone for coming on short notice, and I want the record to show that the company — " He stopped. He looked at the boxes along the wall. "That I take what happened this week seriously. What happened to you, Amos, in your own store, on Tuesday, is indefensible, and the inspection yesterday speaks for itself. Eleven boxes of the archive tagged for shredding. A file of denied second coats that should never have existed. Two apprentice letters unanswered for the better part of a year. I am not going to sit here and call any of that a misunderstanding."
He opened his folder. "So. I had my office work last night. There is a remediation plan, drafted, and it can start today."
He set it out the way he set out everything, in clean numbered parts, and Amos listened to all of it without interrupting, because Amos had learned long ago that you cannot answer a man fairly until you have let him finish being wrong in his own words.
One: the archive. The shredding was cancelled — Santoro had cancelled it himself at six that morning, and he said so plainly. The boxes would be digitized properly this time, by a vendor who specialized in archival work, every card scanned at high resolution, verified against the originals, indexed, audited. Two: the Second Coat Promise. A working group — retail, finance, legal — would review the promise end to end and report by the end of the quarter with recommendations for a sustainable policy. Three: the apprenticeship would be re-examined in the next budget cycle, with a view to restoring it in some form. Four: communications had drafted a statement reaffirming Hartley's heritage and its commitment to its customers.
"And the denials in the file," Santoro said, "would be looked at case by case as part of the review. I am not promising what the review will find. I am promising the review."
He closed the folder. It was, everyone at the table understood, a competent performance. It was the performance of a man who had run operations for thirty years and who knew how to move a problem from the column marked crisis to the column marked process, and in most companies, in most weeks, it would have been enough.
Amos nodded slowly. "You've been up all night too, Bill."
"Most of it."
"Then I won't waste your work by pretending I didn't hear it." Amos opened the folder in front of him — his own, thin, battered, the corners gone soft with years — and took out a single document in a plastic sleeve, the paper inside gone the color of weak tea. "Julie. The framed copy from the Studio wall, if you'd be so kind. I asked her to bring it up," he said to the table, "because mine is the working copy and I want no one saying I read from a draft."
Julie set the frame on the table and stepped back. In the Color Studio downstairs the Founders' Charter had hung for six years behind the design bar, in a frame the color of champagne, where it caught the light beautifully and could be read by no one, facing, as Heather had arranged the lighting, away from the glare.
Amos took his own copy from the sleeve and laid the framed one beside it, and he read the Charter aloud, all of it, in his founder's voice — not loud, not declaiming, but with the steady cadence of a man reading a thing he had written at a kitchen table in the winter of 1971 and had never since needed to read twice.
He read the preamble, about a company that would sell color the way a doctor sells medicine, by the dose and for the person. He read the Second Coat Promise: *If a color is not right in the room it was mixed for, the second gallon is free. No receipt of grievance shall be required beyond the customer's word, for a customer's word is the currency this company was founded to bank.* He read the Hartley Apprenticeship: *Two places a year, paid, for young