Same Door Since 1984
The new logo had been on the laptop screen for eleven minutes, and nobody had said anything about it.
“KP Studio,” Ruth said. “That's us now? That's the brand?”
“It's cleaner. It works on a phone.” Anton turned the laptop toward her. “Nobody can read Kessler Print at that size.”
“Kessler Print has been on that window since before you could walk. If we take the name off the window, half of Bellevue Road will think we sold the shop.”
“Nobody on Bellevue Road is walking past the window anymore. That's the whole problem. There's no market for a shop that people can't find.”
Ruth said the customers would dislike it. Anton said she'd been saying that about everything since 2011. Then they stopped talking for two days.
On Thursday, Anton made an account and posted the logo. He didn't tell his mother, because he already knew what she'd say and he'd heard it twice.
By Friday morning the post had three hundred likes and the shop had one phone call. The call was from the woman who had ordered the same funeral programs from Kessler every winter for nineteen years, and she wanted to know if they had closed.
Ruth put the phone down slowly. “Three hundred people who don't live here,” she said. “And one who does.”
They barely spoke on Saturday. On Sunday, Ruth walked out into the road with Anton's phone and photographed the front of the shop — the old sign, the green letters, the door that still sticks in wet weather. Underneath it she typed one line: Same door since 1984. Bring it in Monday, we'll print it by Friday.
Anton watched the numbers all evening. It wasn't three hundred likes. It was forty shares, and thirty-eight of them came from people with Toledo in their profile.
On Monday there were fourteen jobs in the tray: school posters, a diner menu, and a stack of wedding invitations from a woman in Sylvania who had seen the photo on her sister's feed.
“You promoted the shop,” Anton said. “That's all I was trying to do.”
“I know.”
“So you don't hate the idea. You just hate the logo.”
“I don't want a new name,” Ruth said. “Put the logo on the van, if you want it that badly. Leave the window.”
Anton opened the laptop, then closed it again. “The van,” he said. It wasn't what he'd asked for, but it was a yes, and it was the first one in three weeks.