Elena stood in front of the wall with her thermos while the lights came up in their programmed sequence. It was genuinely lovely. That was the thing nobody in the building could agree how to feel about. It was lovely, and it was a wall with a door in it that most of the people who used to come here could no longer find.
Her grandfather had bought paint at this address for thirty years. Not at the Studio — the Studio was two years old — but at the store that had stood inside this same shell, when the counter ran across the middle of the floor like a bar in a friendly tavern, and the men who painted Grand Rapids for a living came in before seven with their lists half-written on the backs of envelopes, and were served first, before the homeowners, before anybody, because their time was money and Amos Hartley's first law of business was that a painter waiting was a painter losing. They were served on credit carried in a ledger with a cracked spine. They were served coffee strong enough to strip the thing it was served in. Her grandfather, who had painted half the schools in Kent County, used to say that the Hartley counter was the only place in Michigan where a man with paint on his boots was treated like the customer instead of the help.
The counter was in a warehouse now, or in a landfill. The coffee machine in the back room was for staff only, and it made a drink her grandfather would have described, politely, as a rumor.
She finished the opening and went to put the returns in order, and the store filled behind her with its day.
The morning briefing was at eight-thirty, in the glass room at the back that Heather called the Atelier and everyone else called the fishbowl. Julie Anand was not there — Julie was across town at a vendor meeting until mid-afternoon — so the briefing came down the screen from the corporate office across the river, where Heather Collins kept an office with a view of two cranes and a conviction that she could see the future from it.
Heather appeared at two-thirds life size, which somehow made her more rather than less formidable. She was forty-four, with the kind of haircut that required a standing appointment and the kind of voice that required nothing at all. She did not waste the room's time with good morning.
"Numbers," she said. "The flagship is the model. What Monroe Avenue does in October, the region does in March. Average ticket is up eleven percent since the relaunch. Consultation bookings are up thirty. Dwell time means something different in a studio than it did in a store. A client who stays forty minutes is not lost. A client who stays forty minutes is being educated. Finish the education. Sell the room."
Dylan Marsh sat at the table with his notebook open and his pen uncapped, nodding at the screen the way courtiers nod at weather. He was twenty-nine and he dressed for the Studio the way the Studio dressed for its clients — linen the color of wet sand, shoes that had never met a ladder. On the inside cover of the notebook he kept a list he called the Order of the Real: the clients, ranked, who actually mattered. Developers' wives. The two architects who sent their clients in with a name and a budget. The woman from East Grand Rapids who had redone one house three times in four years, each time in a palette Dylan had built for her. He was very good at what he did. Dylan Marsh could stand in a stranger's living room for ninety seconds and name the color that room had been waiting its whole life to be, and he was right so often that being right had become, in him, a kind of deformity — he had begun to believe the rightness extended to people. That he could read a human being at the door, by the shoes, by the hands, by the car at the curb, was the doctrine the Studio had handed him and he had received like a sacrament.
"We sell rooms, not paint," Heather said, on the screen, in the tone of a woman concluding a proof. "Clients, not painters. Let me be plain, because plainness is a kindness. Trade volume is legacy volume. It is low margin, it is high maintenance, and it has no future in the Hartley growth story. The man who wants four gallons of contractor white and a discount is not our client. He is our history. We honor our history in the brochure."
"The Color Archive remediation is on schedule," Heather said, and flipped a page only she could see. "Facilities collects the flat files Friday for digitization review. The digital library is complete and authoritative as of the relaunch; the paper is redundancy with a storage cost. If anyone asks about the archive, the answer is: it's been preserved digitally. That answer is true in every way that matters going forward."