They had been married in 1969, with Marlene's mother crying and Amos's father standing very straight in his one suit, and they had been, from the first year to the last, a single enterprise with two departments. She knew color the way musicians know pitch — absolutely, and with opinions. He knew it the way engineers know load. Between them the company grew the way living things grow, in rings — more stores, trucks with her lettering on the doors, apprentices trained and sent out into the trade with their certificates and their decent wages — because the Charter he had written in 1972, in pencil, on the back of a feed-store invoice, the night before the store opened, with Marlene reading over his shoulder and improving the grammar, had said certain things and he had meant them.
The Charter said that if a color wasn't right, the second gallon was free. It said that young people entering the trade would be trained at the company's expense and paid while they learned, because a trade that ate its young would not be his. And it said that the Archive — every formula card, from the shoebox forward, forever — would be kept intact and honored, because a color mixed for a customer was a promise, and the company did not break promises because a color had gone out of the catalog. Sixty-four stores across the Midwest, the Charter now ran to eleven printed pages, and lawyers in his own employ had explained to him, more than once since he retired from the daily running of the place eight years ago, that certain of the Founders' promises were legacy commitments. Amos had listened with great courtesy and renewed every one of them, unamended, when he stepped back to the chairmanship, with the provision the lawyers liked least of all: that while he lived, none of it could be changed without his written consent. He was not a sentimental man about business. He was a precise man about promises, which people who did not know him mistook for the same thing.
Behind him, the reading room door opened with its particular apologetic creak, and Ellen Voss came in with two mugs of tea and the expression of a woman who has already decided what she is going to say about the ladder and is only choosing the wording.
"You were up there when I came in," she said. "I watched you through the door glass. Both hands, Mr. Hartley."
"Both hands on the way down," Amos said. "On the way up I need one for the brush. It's a compromise the ladder and I have worked out."
"The ladder and you," Ellen said, "are going to be the subject of a memo." She set his tea on the low table beside the atlas stand, where he could reach it without climbing anything. She was sixty-one, the Eastown branch librarian for nineteen of those years, and she ran her building the way Marlene had run a classroom: with total authority and a soft spot she would have denied under oath. "The heron's back," she said, looking up at the wall. "He looks — "
"Wet," Amos said. "He's meant to. He was too dry for forty years. Marlene painted him wading."
"He looks like he's thinking about something."
"He is. He's thinking about the boat. They all are." He came down the last of the way and took the tea, his knees filing their usual report. "Saturday," he said.
"Saturday," Ellen agreed, and something in her voice went a little careful, because Saturday had become, over the eleven days, a fixed star that everyone navigated by and no one was allowed to doubt. The branch had announced it in the newsletter. There was to be a ribbon and a story hour in the restored room, and the children of the summer reading program were coming in their best clothes to see the animals come home. "The room's been closed since August," she said. "They press their faces to the door glass. There's a handprint at exactly four feet high that I have instructed the cleaners to leave alone."
"The river won't be done," Amos said.
He said it mildly. She looked at the wall — at the cleaned, primed, waiting stretch of it, pale under its sealant, where the river's last bend should have run wide and dark to the boat — and then at the can on the ladder shelf.
"There's not enough," she said.
"There's a third of a gallon. The bend wants a gallon and a coat. It wants it in Marlene Blue and nothing else — I've matched worse shades in worse light, Ellen, and I won't start cheating at my own wife's river." He said it without heat; it was not a sentiment, it was a specification. "A substitute would show — in ten years, when the two blues aged apart. She'd have known. She always said a patch is a lie you tell the future."
Ellen Voss looked at the unfinished bend for a long moment. She had known the mural since she was a young librarian shelving under it, and the wall was now depending for its completion on a can that was two-thirds air.