"Help you find something?"
"Yeah — I need six of the ProLine ceiling white, flat, and two of the semi-gloss, the—" he squinted at the list, "—client changed her mind twice, I got it wrote down—"
"ProLine's on the self-serve wall, bay four," Dylan said, pleasantly, already turning half away, the turn itself a sentence. "Ceiling whites are all together. Semi-glosses are bay five. There's a scanner at the end of the bay if you want to check a price." He produced the tone the Studio used for directions to the restroom. "If you need a color consultation, we book those about a week out."
The man looked at him. Something crossed his face that was not anger — anger would have been easier for everyone — but the tireder recognition of a man being shown the new shape of a room he had known for twenty years. "Used to be a counter," he said. "Fella named Walt used to pull my order while I was still parking."
"Walt retired," Dylan said. "Bay four."
"Right." The man refolded his list along its old folds. "And what do I ask the scanner if the white's wrong? Client says the last one went yellow in her kitchen."
"Whites don't yellow," Dylan said, with the finality of a man reciting the catechism of the new building. "Lighting yellows."
"Uh-huh," the man said, and went to bay four, and pulled his own six gallons down from the shelf his own self, two trips, with the hand truck that squeaked, and nobody asked his name. He had a name. His name was Ray Kubiak, and Elena knew it because her grandfather had said it at the dinner table in the tone men use for the reliable. Ray Kubiak, who did the schools. Ray Kubiak, who never left a line.
She went down bay four with a rag she didn't need and a purpose she did, and said, "Mr. Kubiak? The ProLine flat — take it from the end cap. The bay stock is the old formulation, it drags."
He looked at her, and the tiredness rearranged itself into surprise. "You know my name?"
"My grandfather was Tomás Vasquez," Elena said. "He said you never left a line."
Ray Kubiak stood in the aisle holding two gallons of ceiling white, and for a moment the whole gleaming machine of the Studio went out of focus, and there were only two people in a paint store, talking about a dead man who had painted schools. "Tomás," he said. "Jesus. Tomás Vasquez. He did the trim at Jefferson Elementary with a brush older than me." He laughed, once, like a door opening. "He still—"
"He passed in the spring," Elena said. "Two years ago, in the spring."
"I'm sorry to hear it." He set the gallons down, carefully, the way men of his trade set everything down. "He owed me a coffee for about thirty years. Counter coffee. Strongest substance in Kent County." He looked around the bay — the lit shelves, the scanner blinking its small availability — and shook his head, not bitter, only accurate. "Place looks good, though. Looks like a perfume store. I keep expecting somebody to spray my wrist."
"And the semi-gloss — if it's for a kitchen, take the scrub line, it's worth the four dollars. Bay five, top shelf. They hide it because the margin's worse, which is the best review a paint can get in this building."
He grinned at that like a man let in on something. "You should be running this place."
"I shelve returns," Elena said. "It's a position of enormous power. I know where everything is, including the things we're not supposed to have."
She helped him swap the gallons, and at the register she said "Mr. Kubiak" when she handed him the receipt, and he went out into the day with his two trips of paint like a man leaving a country he used to live in — politely, and without looking back at the flag.
Dylan, resetting the alcove, watched the door close. "You can't give the trade the concierge tour, Elena," he said, without heat. Doctrine with Dylan was never heated; that was what made it doctrine. "There's a model. If we start fetching and carrying for every guy with a list, the Studio's just a store again. Heather's whole point—" he gestured at the forty feet of curated light "—is that a store is what we stopped being."
"I gave him directions to a better shelf," Elena said. "In our store. Where he was spending money."
"You gave him a grandfather," Dylan said, and Elena could not tell whether he had meant it as an accusation or as the closest thing to understanding he was capable of before lunch.