When the edges were done he cleaned up the way she had taught him — Marlene had strong views about brushes, and fifty years of marriage had installed them in him like plumbing. Brushes washed and shaped and laid on the cloth in order of size. Lids tapped home. The can of Marlene Blue, the last can, he weighed in his hand once more and set down on the drop cloth with disproportionate care. Then he went to the little sink in the staff washroom and washed his hands.
The paint did not entirely come off. It never did. Fifty-four years of it lived in the seams of his knuckles and the crescents of his nails in a geology no soap had ever excavated — whites and ochers and the ghost of a barn red, a whole career in strata — and today there was the blue, in the crease of his thumb, under two nails, a smear worked deep across the back of his left hand where he had steadied the can. He scrubbed with the pumice soap, rinsed, and decided his hands were as clean as the truth required. There was Marlene Blue on the cuff of his shirt, too, a good thumbprint of it, and more on his trousers at the knee, and — Ellen had not told him, and he would not find it until the flagship's window caught his reflection — a streak of it like a war stripe on one cheek, where he had pushed his hair back at some point on the ladder with a loaded hand.
He did not change his clothes. He owned better clothes; there was a closet of them at home, suits from board years, and a coat Marlene had chosen in Chicago. He had come to the library that morning in his old work clothes — the trousers with the paint history, the shirt soft as paper at the elbows, the canvas jacket he had worn on job sites since before some of his store managers were born — and changing for the flagship had not occurred to him as a category of action. He was, if anything, over-dressed in experience. He put on the canvas jacket and picked up his hat.
Ellen walked him to the door. "Saturday," she said again, at the threshold, and this time it was not careful at all. It was a statement of faith.
"Saturday," Amos said. "Leave the handprint."
"I wouldn't dare touch it," she said, and stood in the doorway and watched him go — an old man in paint-stained work clothes, walking east into the October afternoon with his hat on and his hands swinging, the one with his wife's blue across the back of it swinging freest, covered, sleeve and trouser and (though he did not know it) one cheek, in forty years of other people's colors and one blue that was hers.
Monroe Avenue was six blocks, and the river — the real one, the Grand, dark under its bridges — would be off to his left the whole way, going about its business, knowing things.
He walked toward his own name, in letters Marlene had lettered, to buy a gallon of his own wife's color, and he was not in any hurry at all
The Hartley Color Works on Monroe Avenue opened at nine, but the building woke at seven, and it woke the way a theater wakes — lights first, then the hush, then the performance of a hush rehearsed until it looked like nature.
Elena Vasquez let herself in through the side door at seven-oh-four with her keys and her thermos and the tenderness she always felt for the store before the customers arrived to be impressed by it. In the morning the Studio was only a room. A beautiful room — nobody who worked there, not even Elena, who had opinions, denied that — but a room, with a smell of new carpet and faint, clean solvent, and dust in the light shafts from the high windows making the air itself look expensive.
She went through the opening liturgy in an order that predated the word Studio by decades: coffee on in the back, registers awake, returns bin emptied, color wall lit. Forty feet of it, floor to ceiling, behind glass so clear it seemed not to exist — fan decks of color arranged not by family or by use but by mood, the cards descending in washes: whites like a held breath, then creams, then stones, then the soft greens Heather Collins called "the breathing colors," down through the blues to a bottom row of near-blacks with romantic names. Morning Greige. First Apartment. Divorce White — no, they had renamed that one. New Beginning.
Above the wall, in brushed steel letters an inch tall: THE HARTLEY COLOR STUDIO. Below that, smaller, the sentence Heather had flown in a signwriter from Chicago to letter by hand, because a decal would have been "off-message": We sell rooms, not paint.