Kessler was there in a Saturday sweater, gray, gone soft at the collar β the sweater of a man officially not working who is going to work anyway out of habit. He had stationed himself, without seeming to, where he could see Amos's chair and the door both. All week he had said very little; he had held the ladder and driven the drop cloths and the cans. He had been, Amos understood now, paying something down β the long installment of a boy taken off a stockroom floor in 1990 by a man who had asked a skinny, furious sixteen-year-old what he knew about green, and listened as if it were evidence. This morning he stood at the back of a children's room and said nothing at all, and it was the complete sentence of his life.
Elena Vasquez came in a little late, through the side door, with paint β there would always be paint β under two fingernails, and stopped just inside the threshold, not yet believing it was finished.
She had mixed the river's last gallon on Tuesday, at the flagship, on the big machine, with Iris Bellamy standing behind her saying nothing and Amos standing in front of her saying less. It was Elena who had caught it when the first pour came off a breath too green, stopped the machine with her hand still on the lever, and said, "No. Again. It's not night yet." The second pour had been right. It had been night.
Now Elena walked the wall the way Amos had walked it at seven forty, alone in a crowd, and stopped where the restored stretch began β a seam no one else alive could have found, somewhere above the doe's left ear β and put her fingertips flat against the dry blue. Amos saw her shoulders come down. He saw her understand, in her hand first and then everywhere, that color on a wall is not color in a can, that it is bigger and quieter and outlasts the mixing of it, and he thought: there it goes β the whole company, handed off properly at last, not in a charter or a board vote but in a twenty-two-year-old's palm against a blue wall in a library. The rest was paperwork.
And at the very back, in ordinary clothes, standing where the returns cart had been moved to make room, was Dylan Marsh.
He had come on his own time. Store No. 1 was closed Saturdays in October, had always been, and the month he was serving at its trade counter was a weekday penance with Saturdays left blank in it like unpainted wall. He wore a plain jacket and held a paper cup of coffee in both hands. The counter's old manager had told him, Dylan would explain later, awkwardly: painters go to see their paint dried. It was a trade saying, older than the company. Dylan had not mixed the gallon, and he did not claim it. But he had learned its name the hard way, in a flagship store, in front of witnesses, on a Tuesday that would follow him the rest of his working life, and he had come β because painters go β to see the color dry. He stood at the back and looked at the river a long time. Amos did not wave him over, and did not look away either. He let the looking do its work.
Then Ellen Voss stood up with a folder in her hands β brown, library-issue β and the room settled, because Ellen in a room was a settling influence in the way gravity is.
"I have one more thing," she said, "and then there is cake, which has been mentioned to me by every child here at least twice, so I will be brief. When the mural was finished in 1985 β all but finished β Mrs. Marlene Hartley left a note with the branch. It has been in our files for forty years. Librarians keep things; that is the whole secret of the profession. I am going to read it aloud, because it was written to be read in this room, and this is the room, and you are in it."
She took out a single sheet, and even from across the room Amos knew the handwriting the way he knew the grain of his own bench: Marlene's hand, quick and slanted, the hand of a woman who wrote the way she painted.
"'To whoever is keeping this room,'" Ellen read, "'β thank you. Keeping is the hard part, and I am leaving the easy part to you, which is the wall.
"'The corner by the baseboard, where the river comes down, is not unfinished because I ran out of paint, or time, or nerve. I have painted up to its edge on purpose. It is the part that's theirs β the children's who read here. Someday one of them will know what belongs there, and when she does, I ask that she be given a small brush and the blue β Mr. Hartley will know the blue; ask him for Marlene Blue and do not let him argue β and that nobody correct her hand while she works.