On the screen, she smiled the smile of a woman closing a door from the other side of it. "Monroe Avenue is the model. Make me proud of the model. Dylan — the Vandermeer whole-house consultation is at ten. Land it."
The screen went to the Hartley wordmark, and the fishbowl was just a room again, full of people deciding whether to look at one another. Dylan closed his notebook. "You heard the woman," he said, pleasantly. "We're the model."
The ten o'clock was the kind of appointment the Studio had been built for. Mrs. Vandermeer arrived at nine-fifty-eight in a car that cost more than the building's annual coffee budget and a coat the color of the inside of a shell. She was sixty-one, kind in the unpracticed way of people who have never had to be anything else, and she was redoing the whole of a house on Reeds Lake that she described, apologetically, as "too much house, but the light—" She said the light the way other people said a person's name.
Dylan took her into the consultation alcove, where the light was engineered to tell the truth at four different hours of the day, and he did the thing he did. He asked what she wanted the house to feel like at Christmas, and she laughed, surprised, and said nobody had ever asked her that, and he said, "Then nobody has ever painted your house," and she laughed again, the real laugh this time, and within twenty minutes he was building her a palette the way a composer builds a theme — a white with a heartbeat for the hall, a green like deep water for the room where the light came late, and for the library a blue so dark and so certain that Mrs. Vandermeer put her hand flat against the sample card as if it were warm.
"That," she said. "What is that?"
"Nightfall Reverie," Dylan said. "It's one of our studio blues." He did not say — because why would he, it was not a thing the Studio said — that the family's root, the blue from which forty years of Grand Rapids bedrooms and nurseries and one famous library mural had descended, had been taken off the wall two years ago in the relaunch, because it tested, in Heather's phrase, as "heritage-coded — reads old." The card had been called Marlene Blue. Its grandchildren were everywhere in the room, renamed like orphans adopted into better houses.
Mrs. Vandermeer booked the whole house — the premium finish, the consultation package, the follow-up visit. At the register, Elena rang the deposit and said, "The library will be beautiful, Mrs. Vandermeer," and the woman turned to her with the pleased surprise of a person addressed by furniture.
"You think so? The blue room?"
"My grandmother had a blue room," Elena said. "Not like yours. Small. But you never wanted to leave it. That's what a blue room is for."
Mrs. Vandermeer looked at her for a moment with real attention and said, "You're wasted on the register, dear," in the tone of a compliment, and swept out into the October light with her samples in a linen bag with rope handles.
"She's not wrong," Dylan said, mildly, from the alcove doorway, meaning it as a kindness and landing it as something else. "You have an eye. You should finish your degree, Elena. Get out of the returns bin." He said returns bin the way one says a diagnosis. "This place eats retail lifers."
"My grandfather bought paint here for thirty years," Elena said.
"And mine played golf," Dylan said, and smiled, and went to reset the alcove, and the conversation was over the way conversations with Dylan were always over — not concluded, just outranked.
The painter came in at eleven-forty, and the whole store performed the small, silent recalculation the Studio had trained into it the way a school of fish turns — not cruelty, exactly; something more efficient and therefore worse.
He was maybe fifty, with a forearm like a rope and paint under his nails in three colors and a folded list in his hand, soft with being folded. In the old store he would have been at the counter already, coffee coming, the order half-pulled before he finished saying it. In the Studio he stopped just inside the door, because the Studio was designed to make a man like him stop. That was not a side effect. Elena had been there for the training. Sight lines, the consultant had called it. A pause point. The pause point was a rug the color of deep water and a table with a sculpture on it that was either a wave or a flame, and the man stood on the rug holding his list, and looked around for the counter, and there was no counter, and the looking itself marked him.
Dylan emerged from the alcove with his client smile already on, and Elena watched the smile do its triage — shoes, hands, list, truck through the glass — and settle into its second setting, the one for redirecting weather.