"It is lighter by one brush," Amos said.
"Then it did its job." She put her hand flat on its lid. "Amos. She'd have—" and Ellen, who had read a dead woman's note aloud that morning without one crack in her voice, stopped, and finished it plain. "She'd have charged admission to watch you on that ladder. And then she'd have given every child its money back at the door."
"She'd have painted the ladder," Amos said. "It's why I learned to keep moving." He put his hat on. "Thank you for the tea, Ellen. Even the filing-cabinet tea."
"Go home the short way, Amos Hartley."
"I will," he lied, and they both heard it, because some lies are only a man's way of asking the day for one more page.
He walked home the long way, past the flagship.
The store was closed for the day, its Saturday hours done, but the trade counter's new sign was already up inside the dark front window — THE TRADE COUNTER, in the old block letters from the original fascia drawings, which Iris had dug out of the archive and Heather Collins, to her credit and the visible alarm of her department, had approved without a single focus group. Next weekend, if the schedule held, Heather herself would be standing behind that counter in a company apron, beginning her quarter of Saturdays. A sign is a promise.
And beside the main door, in the deep front window that had showcased, for twenty years, whatever the season's fashion in wall color was said to be, the lights were still on. The Color Library was not open yet — opening was set for November, with Iris Bellamy as its curator and Elena Vasquez as her trainee, and the whole Color Archive coming out of the flat drawers to live in the light. But Iris had been in that morning, leaving one true thing in place ahead of the furniture, to tell the rest what it was for.
In the window, in a small black frame no bigger than a paperback, stood a single card. Formula Card No. 001. Marlene Blue. The handwriting on it was his own at thirty-seven: the weights, the bases, the grind, the little note in the margin — her words, written down the night she named it: night water; light underneath; do not sell the daylight version to anybody, A. — and beneath the formula, smaller, her name. Marlene. Just that.
And beneath the frame, on the window's ledge, on the inside of the glass, someone had pressed — recently; the paint was not yet dry; it shone wet in the low light — a child's handprint, in blue. Small. Five fingers, slightly smudged at the thumb.
Amos did not know whose it was. He stood on the sidewalk outside his own flagship in the October evening, his empty toolbox in his hand, and considered the possibilities the way a man considers the stars: not to settle it, but to have the pleasure of the list. Iris, making way for a visiting family. Elena, signing the room she would one day be given charge of. Some child of the neighborhood, let in at last by a keeper who understood keeping.
It did not matter whose. That was the whole of it. The card was in the window, with his young handwriting on it and his wife's name, and below it a new hand had begun the record in fresh blue, and the library was not even open yet and already it was being written in.
Amos stood a while. He thought about the company he had built to sell color, and how the color had outlasted every fashion the store had ever dressed its windows in, every quarterly gospel, every consultant with a chart. A formula card is a small thing. A blue is a small thing. A brush in a toolbox, a seat saved in a corner, a star low on a wall where the fawn can see it when she drinks. He had spent a working lifetime among large things — warehouses, fleets, contracts, a charter with his name in the preamble — and the large things had done their work and been filed, and the small things were still warm.
What a man makes, he thought, turning for home with the light going down gold over Grand Rapids, is only ever an errand toward what he loves. The color was an errand. The company was the errand's long way around. The river was what the errand was for.
At the corner of Fuller Avenue he stopped and looked back once at the window — the small frame, the card, the wet blue hand below it, shining — and then he went on home to supper, walking unhurried through the early dark, his step, for a man of eighty with an empty toolbox, the step of a man whose errand had come back with the message delivered.
— The End —