"Then we'll get more," she said. "Tell me what to order. The city covered materials; the purchase order's still open; I'll call your flagship and — "
"No," Amos said.
It came out gently, but with the quality his staff had learned over fifty years to recognize: the no fully thought through before it was spoken. The no with foundations.
"Mr. Hartley — "
"The color's not on the wall at the flagship anymore, Ellen. They took it off two years ago, in the redesign. Retired it." He had learned this the way he learned most things about his company now, late and from the side, in the trade circular that still came to the house. Marlene Blue, discontinued from the retail color wall. A line in a list of forty. He had sat with that line for an evening at the kitchen table, the house very quiet, and had not, in the end, telephoned anyone about it. A chairman who telephones about one blue among forty has to explain what the blue is, and some explanations a man keeps for himself. "They'll still mix it. The tinting machines are there — the flagship's the only store that kept the old equipment. And the formula's in the Archive. Card number one. But it has to be mixed from the card, by someone at the bench, and checked against the standard — I want to see the drawdown before it leaves the store. A color is not a thing you describe over the telephone, Ellen. It's a thing you stand in front of."
"Then I'll send David," Ellen said. David was the branch's senior clerk. "With a note. With the card number written down. He can stand in front of it."
"He'd stand in front of whatever they handed him and thank them for it," Amos said, "and they'd hand him whatever the machine said, and if the base had drifted — and bases drift, Ellen, bases drift the way rivers do, a little every year — we'd have a gallon of almost. Almost doesn't go on that wall." He set the tea down, still mostly full. "No. I'll go myself. This afternoon. It's a gallon of paint. It's not an expedition."
"You're eighty years old and you've been on a ladder since eight o'clock — "
"Since seven-thirty, and I'm aware of my age; it follows me around." He was already moving, with the unhurried finality of a man whose mind had gone ahead of the conversation. "I'll finish the bend's edges, so the line is set, and I'll clean the brushes, and I'll walk over to Monroe Avenue and have them mix me a gallon of my own wife's color from my own company's archive, and I'll carry it back, and tomorrow morning the river gets finished, and Saturday the children get their room. That is the whole of the plan. It doesn't have a part in it where I fall off anything."
Ellen looked at him with her librarian's look, then sighed the sigh of a woman who has run the meeting and lost the vote. "You'll want a ride, at least," she said. "The flagship's a mile — "
"I'll want a walk," Amos said. "October's the best month in Michigan and I intend to spend some of it outdoors. And Ellen — " he pointed the brush at her, mildly, the way he had pointed it at apprentices for fifty years — "don't telephone ahead. Don't warn them. I don't want a fuss at the store, and I don't want a gallon mixed by a committee before I get there. I want to go in and buy a gallon of paint like a customer. It's my favorite thing my company does. Let me do it the ordinary way."
She left him the tea anyway and took the other mug back to her office.
Amos climbed the ladder one more time, both hands on the way up and the brush in his teeth for four rungs, which was not a part of the compromise he intended to report. He set the bend's edges first, as he had said he would: a clean, true line where the Marlene Blue would end and the pale waiting plaster began, the margin of reeds darkened in so tomorrow's color would have a border to run to. It was fussy, patient work, the kind his hands liked best, and the room was quiet around him except for the ordinary music of a library — a cart's wheel somewhere, a child's voice two rooms away, the radiators ticking as the day warmed.
Below the bend, in the lower corner, the unfinished stretch lay sealed and pale, its charcoal heron standing one-legged in water that had never been given a color. Amos looked down at it from the ladder for a moment.
"Not mine," he said, to the room at large, the way Marlene used to talk to the wall, and went on setting his line.