"Sir. Mr. Hartley. I don't have an excuse that would interest you."
"Then you're ahead of most of us at your age," Amos said. "Sit down, Dylan. No — not at the door. Here. Chairs are for people who intend to stay in the conversation." Dylan sat, at the far end of the table, very upright. "Now. I am going to ask you a question, and I want the truth, because the truth is the only material left in this room that isn't spoken for. When I came into the Studio on Tuesday — the jacket, the stains, the cap — what did you see?"
Dylan swallowed. "I saw a man who couldn't afford what we sell," he said. "I saw — I told myself he was killing time. Looking at the design wall like people look in bakery windows. And I said what I said. About the big-box store. That they do house-painter colors." His voice went rough. "You were holding a formula card, sir. From memory I know now it was one you'd written. I didn't look at your hands. A colorist is supposed to look at the hands."
"No," Amos said gently. "A colorist is supposed to look at the person. The hands are just where the person keeps the evidence." He folded his own hands. "Here is what I believe happened on Tuesday, Dylan, and I have had two days to think about it. You did what the room taught you. The Studio taught you that a customer is a category — designer, renovator, trade, browser — and that a browser in a stained jacket is a problem to be moved along. That teaching drifted in, the way bad color drifts, one degree at a time, while the Charter hung behind the bar facing the wall. I built the room wrong, in the end, by leaving it. That's mine. Your part is yours, and it's smaller than this company is about to try to make it, because a firing before lunch would be a story we tell ourselves to avoid the harder one. I decline the story."
"Sir?" Dylan said.
"You will spend one month at the trade counter of Store No. 1," Amos said, "under its manager, who has run that counter since before you were born and who still believes a gallon is a promise with a handle on it. You will mix for painters. You will load trucks in the rain. You will learn what the men you moved along do all day, and what it costs them when we get a color wrong. Your pay continues; I'm not interested in your rent, only your education. And your return to the Studio is not on a calendar. It will be earned by the counter's judgment — when the old man at Store No. 1 tells Kessler you're a colorist again, and not before. Do you understand the terms?"
"Yes, sir."
"And Dylan — don't apologize to me in this room. Rooms are cheap to apologize in. Apologize at the counter, with your hands, for a month, to the trade. That's the currency." Amos rose then, a hand on the table for the geography of it, and the whole table rose with him out of some reflex older than the company. "Then the business is done. Iris, keep the letters; the library will want them — a color archive ought to remember what it cost to keep it. Bill, the letters to the file. Heather, your withdrawal, today. Elena — " and here the old man smiled for the second time that morning, and it changed his whole face " — Elena, I have a gallon to buy, and I'd like you to mix it."
They went down the back stairs together, the oddest procession the flagship had produced in years: the founder and the trainee, the emerita and the CEO, down into the bright Studio with its design wall and its champagne frame standing empty on the floor where Julie had taken the Charter down. Elena went behind the mixing bench with Iris at her shoulder, and she pulled the first box's first card — for Amos had asked for Formula No. 001, the first card in the archive, the one in his own young hand, dated the spring of 1972, in ink that had gone brown: Marlene Blue, eggshell. The color he had mixed for Marlene Hartley for the kitchen of the house on the river side of town, mixed and remixed eleven times in one April week until his wife stood in the doorway with her arms folded and said, *that one, Amos, that's the river in the morning,* and he had written it down and built a company on the card.