Elena Vasquez sat up the way a person does when a hand touches a shoulder in a crowd.
"Elena brought an old man water on Tuesday when the room she'd been trained in was laughing at him, and she did it before she knew whose store it was, which is the only time it counts. She will be the library's first trainee colorist, under Iris, learning the cards the way they're meant to be learned — by mixing them. If that's agreeable to you, Elena."
Elena's answer took a moment to arrive, because she was crying in the unembarrassed way of the very young, and when it came it was only, "Yes, sir. Mr. Hartley. Yes." Iris Bellamy reached over, without looking, and put her hand over Elena's on the table, and left it there.
"Three," Amos said. "The apprenticeship reopens this year — not in a budget cycle, this year, with this year's two places paid at the rate the Charter's schedule sets out. There are two letters in a drawer downstairs that have been waiting most of a year for an answer, from two teenagers who asked this company to teach them a trade and were met with silence, which is the rudest answer there is. They are answered this week — by a person, by telephone first — and they are brought in and put to the bench, and the bench chooses, the way the Charter says: by the hands, not the résumé. Iris, I'm asking you to sit on that bench. Kessler, I'm asking you to make it happen before their school terms start, so nobody has to choose between us and an education."
"You have it," Kessler said.
"Four. The trade counter comes back to this flagship's floor." Amos looked at Julie Anand. "It never should have left. A flagship that is embarrassed by the men who actually apply its product for a living is a flagship that has forgotten what the building is for. Robert, you'll oversee the refit — the counter where it used to be, by the north windows, with the long bench and the light a man can judge a color by. And Heather — "
Heather Collins had gone still in the particular way of a person who hears her name coming in a sentence whose end she cannot predict.
"You keep your job," Amos said. "I want that said before anything else, because I won't have it said afterward that you survived this meeting on sufferance. You built the Studio, and the Studio is worth keeping — worth keeping honestly, with the Charter read into its walls instead of framed behind its bar. But doctrine should be learned where it lands. So for one quarter — thirteen Saturdays — you will work the trade counter yourself. Not observe it. Work it. Mix for the contractors. Hear what a painter says at seven in the morning when a color's wrong and a client is waiting and a promise is the only thing standing between him and a ruined week. At the end of the quarter you may write me a memo about the promise, and I promise you it will be the best-informed memo this company has ever received, whichever way it argues."
Heather was quiet for a moment. "Starting this Saturday?" she said.
"Starting this Saturday."
"Then I'll need an apron that fits," she said, "and somebody to teach me the tint machine properly, because I have only ever known how to approve one." Amos laughed — really laughed, the founder's laugh that half the table had never heard — and the laugh went around the table like a window opening.
Which left, as everyone in the room knew, one piece of business, and it was Santoro who raised it, because it was his instinct and he had not yet been cured of it.
"Then there's Marsh," he said. "Dylan Marsh. Amos, what happened at that counter Tuesday — the things he said to you, in front of customers — I have the termination drafted. It can be done before lunch. I thought you'd want it done before lunch." He paused. "I thought it would demonstrate something."
"It would," Amos said. "It would demonstrate that this company sacrifices the youngest person in the room to make the oldest people in it feel clean. Bring him up, would you, Julie. He's been waiting downstairs since eight, I imagine, in his good shirt, doing arithmetic about his rent. No man should do that arithmetic alone for three hours; it's bad for the soul and worse for the sums."
Dylan Marsh came up the back stairs and into the room the way a man enters a chapel he's been told he may have desecrated — twenty-nine years old, senior color consultant, Studio-trained and Studio-polished, and looking, this morning, about nineteen. He stood inside the door with his hands clasped in front of him, and he looked at the boxes along the wall, and at the people at the table, and last at Amos, and what he said was not the speech he had prepared.